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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Anyone got an insight into how well this is going? Compared to when the company was active, how fast is progress? Would you bet on Rethink in this day and age?

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I did bet on it and so far I'm happy as long as it continues to work. Sure, I would like it to be developed further, but what I have now is great and works well.

As for progress, it slowed down to non-existent during the handover period, and now seems to be picking up.

Great to hear that! Is there any issues close to being show-stoppers or any "it would have been immensely helpful to have this but I can work around it" features? Also, what would be the thing that RethinkDB is really good at that makes you keep using it?

I use it for two major reasons:

1. It's distributed. I can elastically add/remove nodes. I need this not so much for scalability, as for reliability, and I want to be future-proof.

2. Changefeeds. Nothing else even comes close, and my entire application is built around them.

I have no show-stoppers. The thing works. Sure, I'd love to see some things done differently (ReQL looks nice at a first glance, but has many limitations in practice, causing code that ends up being quite complex), but overall even if it were to stay exactly the way it is now, I'd continue using it.

well, you can have a quick look at how many commits in the last 3 months vs total number of commits they had so far.

not trying to judge anything as I no longer follow the project, but I think those numbers do tell the story.

Looking at the graphs on github you could say development has slowed down, but i'd like to argue that since there is no commercial incentive anymore the project seems to be much more focussed on stability. And when bugfixing you write less lines while spending the same amount of time.

To me focus on stability is the most important thing in a database so this makes me happy as an ops person, get it stable first and then if needed add more features. though i think rethinkdb is already quite feature complete.

In my personal opinion (based on heavily using RethinkDB for two years), many of the core issues of RethinkDB are related to performance, not bugs. I had bet on where RethinkDB would end up performance wise, had development continued with people who really understand how it works doing fulltime development.

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