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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I am using RethinkDB in PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/). I initially picked it because I wanted a JSON document database that has a correctly implemented distributed story. But later on it turned out that the realtime-push (changefeeds) functionality is actually fundamental for me. I used it to build an app where every open sessions gets instant updates.

Right now I don't know what other database I could use, because I found no other solution that supports this kind of functionality, especially in a distributed setting.

I agree with most of your analysis and I think that the most important part is about "worse is better": many of your potential customers won't understand or won't care about correctness or consistency.

That said, I really like RethinkDB (oh, it does have its warts, but overall it's great), I'm very thankful for it, and I hope it will continue as an open-source project.

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I could be wrong but the only other database I've been able to find, with the ability to subscribe to events, is GunDB (http://gun.js.org/).

The only other option is to put something in front of a DB like FeathersJS, or deepstream.io

RethinkDB is a breath of fresh air and I really hope the community will be able to keep it alive.

Agreed, there is still a market for that imo. couchDB has it, but it's so slow :( Right now if you want a good DB and a pubsub/notification/streaming capability, that means either increased latency (polling the DB in your application layer and handle the notifications there) or using another dedicated system (kafka, redis, etc) with all the added complexity that introduce :(

It is a very different model, but have you tried Realm?

It is more of an object model that a straight up JSON store, but it has some of the best notification features I have tried. You can observe both object and query results in realtime, and since the dataset is replicated to you it has zero-latency local access.

They used to only support mobile, but now they also have a node.js version for server side use.

In my opinion Realms observability is light years ahead of all the other offerings out there.

Yes, it looks really good — but it's a different kind of database (I think). From a quick glance, it's an embedded object database used mostly client-side, while what I need is a distributed server-side database.

> Right now I don't know what other database I could use, because I found no other solution that supports this kind of functionality, especially in a distributed setting.

Have you looked at Datomic? It's not free but I think it provides the functionality you are looking for.

Yes. In fact it would fit my app very well, because it's also written in Clojure, and I'm even using datascript on the frontend side.

But "$5000 per Year per System" is outside of my price range for the foreseeable future.

same here, i cannot imagine what else i would use instead of rethinkdb + horizon.

firebase is also a realtime json database. I am quite satisfied with it till now

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