Documents are RethinkDB's main data structure. To fully understand and use the database, you need to think in documents. In this chapter, we're going to go through the lifecycle of designing and saving a document in RethinkDB. We'll follow up by reading, aggregating, and querying documents using ReQL. In the previous section, you'll see how RethinkDB can also manipulate and transform query results.
Documents are self-contained units of data. In relational databases, you might have heard the term record to describe something similar. When you insert some information into a database, the data is usually made up of small native types such as integers and strings. Documents are the first level of abstraction over these native types. They give primitive data some structure and logically group it. Additionally, RethinkDB documents support more complex data types such as binary data, dates and times, and arrays.
Suppose we want to store the age of a person in the database. This data might...