RethinkDB: Livelier than All Living. Now under the wing of the Linux Foundation

Over the past few months, the situation around RethinkDB has been very vague; it was hard to say anything about the future of the project. But the situation was finally resolved , the long-awaited update appeared on the official blog with an explanation of the current state of things. As it became known, CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) bought the rights to the source code of RethinkDB and transferred the project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Before the transfer, the code was transferred from the AGPLv3 license to Apache 2.0. The transfer was implemented as part of an initiative undertaken by former RethinkDB developers to transfer community control over the project.

When the company developing the RethinkDB DBMS announced the closure , a group of already former employees, with the support of other members of the community, organized a team whose goal was to completely transfer the project to the community with a license change. From the announcement of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we see that the situation has finally resolved - CNCF bought the rights to the RethinkDB sorts and transferred the project to the Linux Foundation under ASLv2 license.

RethinkDB lives and lives! DBMS development will continue without interruption. You can continue to use Rethink in production, updates will continue to be released. With the support of the Linux Foundation, the project will continue to evolve.

In recent months, the community has shown interest in supporting the project with a coin. Now you can donate in support of the project. Stripe also agreed to support the $ 25,000 project.

A bit about RethinkDB

RethinkDB is an open source NoSQL database ( sorts on github ), which has a built-in change notification system . Instead of queries to the database for changes, you can "subscribe" to streaming updates, which will eliminate unnecessary queries to the database.

RethinkDB is a schema-free repository for JSON documents, but it also supports some features of relational databases. RethinkDB also supports clustering, which makes it very easy to expand. You can configure sharding and copying through the built-in web interface. The latest version of RethinkDB also includes an automatic fail-over»For clusters with three or more servers. (Translator's note: the possibility of continuing to work with the database if one of the servers

crashes is implied .) The query language in RethinkDB, called ReQL, is natively embedded in the code in the language in which you write your application. If, for example, you code in Python, then when writing queries to the database you will use the usual syntax for Python. Each request is made up of functions that the developer puts in a chain to accurately describe the necessary operation.

And now what?

The team will continue to open source software, content, a lot of art (due to the wonderful @annieruygt ) and documentation that were developed by the core team over the past 7 years. We are also talking with CNCF about the possibility of becoming an Inception project.

The new release of RethinkDB is already in the works: for the last few months, volunteers have contributed a lot to the project. In the coming days, you can expect the release of RethinkDB 2.4. The new version includes various improvements from the community, as well as features developed by the team of former Resinkovists themselves. RethinkDB 2.3.6 will also be released with a fix for important bugs.

Why so long?

After the company was closed, the project was mothballed. It was impossible to simply fork it and continue development under a different name due to the AGPL license. CNCF resolved the conflict by purchasing all the sources.

Join the RethinkDB Community

If you want to participate in the community, there are many ways to do this:

• Read about how to smuggle in RethinkDB.
• Join the # open-rethinkdb channel on the RethinkDB channel on Slack .
• Throw pull-quests and create tickets on GitHub .
• Subscribe to @rethinkdb on Twitter.

To keep abreast of events, read the notes from the last meeting in January .

Interesting related links:

1. An interesting post from Bryan Cantrill (CTO Joyent). A little thought on why AGPL is bad.
2. Clouds over RethinkDB?
3. Postportem by Slava Akhmechet

PS I know that in the ru segment, few people use this DBMS. But for those who, nevertheless, waited and hoped, the news would be pleasant.