RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

Hey, this is Slava, founder of rethinkdb. There are some obvious high level differences:

* A far more advanced query language -- distributed joins, subqueries, etc. -- almost anything you can do in SQL you can do in RethinkDB

* MVCC -- which means you can run analytics on your realtime system without locking up

* All queries are fully parallelized -- the compiler takes the query, breaks it up, distributes it, runs it in parallel, and gives you the results

But beyond that, details matter. Database system differ on what they make easy, not what they make possible. We spent an enormous amount of time on building the low-level architecture and working on a seamless user experience. If you play with the product, I think you'll see these differences right away.

Note: rethink is a new product, so it'll inevitably have quirks. We'll fix all the bugs as quickly as we can, but it'll take a few months to iron things out that didn't come up in testing.

I don't know much about RethinkDB yet, but I will say that I have been a big fan (online) of one of its founders, Slava Akhmechet, for years. I've never met him, but he wrote some terrific articles on his website, http://www.defmacro.org/ , a few years ago. Start at the bottom of the list of articles, with "The Nature of Lisp."

Slava is a deep thinker, which makes me very excited to take a look at RethinkDB.

Suggestion: It would be great to have a page on your website that explains why RethinkDB is better than the other prevailing options. Right now I don't know why I'd want to invest time setting up yet another database.

Thanks -- fixed.