Databases are all around us. In the modern web, almost every website that we visit and the web-based applications that we use have a database system working behind the frontend. Web developers are constantly looking for new database solutions that adapt to the modern web, allowing them to store data in a simpler manner.
RethinkDB is both the simplest and the most powerful document database technology available across Linux and OS X platforms. Based on robust and feature-rich software, RethinkDB provides a bunch of features that can be used to develop some real-time web applications that can be scaled incredibly easily. RethinkDB is also open source, so the source code is freely downloadable from the database GitHub repository.
This book provides an introduction to RethinkDB. The following chapters will give you some understanding and coding tips to install and configure the database and start developing web applications with RethinkDB in no time.
Chapter 1, Introducing RethinkDB, explains how to download and install RethinkDB on both Linux and OS X.
Chapter 2, The ReQL Query Language, explains the basics of RethinkDB's query language and how to use it to run simple queries on the database.
Chapter 3, Clustering, Sharding, and Replication, explores the different techniques you can use to scale RethinkDB.
Chapter 4, Performance Tuning and Advanced Queries, gives out best practices to obtain optimal performance and explores more advanced queries.
Chapter 5, Programming RethinkDB in Node.js, explains how to interact with the database using the Node.js programming language.
Chapter 6, RethinkDB Administration and Deployment, teaches you how to maintain your RethinkDB database instance and how to deploy it to the cloud.
Chapter 7, Developing Real-Time Web Applications, explores how to develop a full-fledged Node.js web application based on RethinkDB.