Ask HN: Anyone Using RethinkDB in Production?

[m33k44]

RethinkDB[0] looks like a "too good to be true" type of database. Anyone using it in production? What is your experience like? What are the pros and cons?

[0] https://rethinkdb.com

[rektide]

Before my time but we had some extended outages owing to rethink. We pushed most of our documents into postgres jsonb. We got pretty far relationalizing the data when I was here, but there was some bad old data that wasn't porting & debates about if the architecture was right, & we gave up the relationalization effort, after a squad worked on it for over a year, basically at the go/no go mark. Sad stuff. But the architecture was pretty meh.

I might suggest checking out ArrangoDB if you are RethinkDB interested. Similar capabilities ish. Very active development. They up sell pretty heavily into the Enterprise offering but the community one is still quite capable.

[gigatexal]

Does ArrangoDB have the changefeed thing that RethinkDB does? It's really nice to be able to sub to changes to a collection/table/etc in a single line.

[rektide]

Good point. That was an excellent & super useful capability. I don't think Arrangodb has such a capability.

[gigatexal]

Cons? It's dead -- or so I thought it was. Seems it was open sourced and is getting regular updates and releases. I really liked the idea of it when it came on the scene but have not looked at it yet.

What is your use-case? Why do you think RethinkDB would be good for it?

[m33k44]

> What is your use-case?

Want a DB to store highly connected massive graph structure with requirement of auditing and analytics.

> Why do you think RethinkDB would be good for it?

It is a document store, supports changefeed, is distributed and fault-tolerant, supports geospatial types, auto-sharding and can scale horizontally.

[gigatexal]

Can you do a PoC and see if it will work? One of the things I learned in econ is you can't really understand what price a market will support without putting up a store and selling something.

[m33k44]

Yes, I will be doing that. But thought I will ask the wider community here before proceeding. It will help me avoid problems others have faced.

[gigatexal]

Rektide's comment about data corruption is troubling, but perhaps they have fixed those. I wonder has RethinkDB been Jepsen tested recently? 2.2.3 was tested, seems ok, latest version is 2.4.x https://jepsen.io/analyses/rethinkdb-2-2-3-reconfiguration

[gigatexal]

You've convinced me to take another look at it. I had written it off. I thought it was dead.

[rozenmd]

I wouldn't: https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum/

Just use Postgres.

[nik736]

I really liked the idea of RethinkDB back in the day but sadly had a lot of performance issues with it shortly before it was sunset, so it went off my radar. TIL that it's still updated and continues to thrive as an open source solution.