Couple of months ago I came across Rethink DB - The open-source database for the real-time web.

I’m really interesting about real-time web tools and technologies.

Last year I played with Meteor. And I still think it’s pretty nice framework. It’s great especially for simple projects. What I don’t like about Meteor is that you have to opt-in into all decisions them made. For example, you have to use MongoDB (at least at the moment) you can’t use npm packages (at least at the moment). As I know Meteor team is moving to elaborate these issues.

As for Firebase it’s great, but again you have to opt-in and there is a possibility that you’ll have to switch from it at some point if your project does not fit well anymore.

I’m looking into the stack which allows rapid development of real-time apps and in the same gives me all options. So I can easily make any decisions which fits better for the given project.

That’s why Rethink DB looks so interesting. First of all it’s a powerful, easy to use and configure document database. You can configure sharding and replication in a few clicks. You can create cluster very easily again using fancy web UI!
More other Rethink DB allows you to subscribe to change notifications. For example, NodeJS application would subscribe to changes in messages table in just a few lines and then it will push changes to clients using socket.io. Another use case is to send data into Elastic Search to allow full text search.

The great thing is all aspects are under you control. You decide what exactly send to Elastic Search, so instead of sending the whole document you just send fields you want to be searchable. Same way you decide what to send do clients and you can easily customize that at any point.

If you’d like to learn more about Rethink DB there is a great RethinkDB Fundamentals course at Pluralsight

RethinkDB team recently released Horizon - realtime, open-source backend for JavaScript apps. As you can expect it’s using RethinkDB as a central component.