Book Image

Getting Started with RethinkDB

By : Gianluca Tiepolo
Book Image

Getting Started with RethinkDB

By: Gianluca Tiepolo

Overview of this book

RethinkDB is a high-performance document-oriented database with a unique set of features. This increasingly popular NoSQL database is used to develop real-time web applications and, together with Node.js, it can be used to easily deploy them to the cloud with very little difficulty. Getting Started with RethinkDB is designed to get you working with RethinkDB as quickly as possible. Starting with the installation and configuration process, you will learn how to start importing data into the database and run simple queries using the intuitive ReQL query language. After successfully running a few simple queries, you will be introduced to other topics such as clustering and sharding. You will get to know how to set up a cluster of RethinkDB nodes and spread database load across multiple machines. We will then move on to advanced queries and optimization techniques. You will discover how to work with RethinkDB from a Node.js environment and find out all about deployment techniques. Finally, we’ll finish by working on a fully-fledged example that uses the Node.js framework and advanced features such as Changefeeds to develop a real-time web application.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with RethinkDB
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing ReQL


A database is only as good as its query language.

For a developer, the query language is basically an interface to the database; however, it's disappointing to say that most of the existing query languages are easy to use or powerful but not both. Thankfully, with ReQL, you get the best of both worlds as the query language is intuitive but very powerful at the same time.

An explicit query language

Instead of writing complex, SQL-like queries, ReQL lets you write practical, simple queries. One of its best features is that ReQL can be considered an explicit query language. The way in which you approach RethinkDB is not only simple and intuitive, but it also gives you a good idea of how the query is being executed within the database, giving you the right balance of abstraction.

Let's look at an example query:

r.table('users').filter({ name: 'Alex' }).orderBy(r.desc('age'))

In this simple query, we get all the users with the name Alex ordered in descending order by age. If we were...