From the homepage:
An open-source distributed database built with love.
Enjoy an intuitive query language, automatically parallelized queries, and simple administration.
Table joins and batteries included.
and the overview:
RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.
Simple programming model:
- JSON data model and immediate consistency.
- Distributed joins, subqueries, aggregation, atomic updates.
- Hadoop-style map/reduce.
Easy administration:
- Friendly web and command-line administration tools.
- Takes care of machine failures and network interrupts.
- Multi-datacenter replication and failover.
Horizontal scalability:
- Sharding and replication to multiple nodes.
- Queries are automatically parallelized and distributed.
- Lock-free operation via MVCC concurrency.
Just once I would like to see a software release where the feature list reads:
<humor>Job Security – Never mentioned by “easy to learn” software packages. Our software is a stone cold bitch to learn. The usual ‘hello world” takes the better part of a day. But, who wants to write “hello world?”
Once you do learn it, it has more power than native C code and is faster. Are you a top gun programmer or a script kiddie? We write software for the former, not the latter.
</humor>
Probably not going to happen.
BTW, at this time ReThinkDB does not support secondary indexes. But the way the documentation reads, that doesn’t sound like a permanent condition.
Could be useful for some cases and certainly will be.