Lots of congratulating on this thread and a hell of a lot of points for a software release. I've been on HN consistently for a long while and I didn't realize there was so much love and hype for RethinkDB here.
I guess you have. There are a lot of us into alternative databases that are hoping for Rethink to fulfill the original promise of MongoDB. That said, I can't blame you for not devoting a bunch of attention to it. :)
It's a nightmare to scale and has performance quirks that are really unexpected. Many, many companies have had to spend enormous amounts of developer time to migrate off of MongoDB to something else.
I think mongodb is following a similar path to what MySQL did. Be really good at one thing, market as something else -- and then slowly, slowly catch up to the hype (sort of).
As I understand it mongodb have changed the default settings (probably why someone downvoted you) -- but the fact that it was off by default is still something that is rightfully hard for the team to live down.
And while a lot of people are probably still happily using MySQL -- I personally see little use for it, when PostgreSQL is an option.
I maybe wrong, but I think both mongodb and mysql appeal to the same groups: people that don't know or care about normalization, databases and datastructures -- and really just want image (as in Smalltalk) based development, but has been tricked into using php/javascript etc.
It's kind of crazy that you have two mature (one Free, one free) object databases that have seen some real-world usage -- and neither get any love.
One is zodb, the Z object database, developed for zope/plone -- one of the first web application frameworks -- and a major contributor to python (invented eggs, buildout...). It's ridiculously easy to use outside of zope/plone/pyramid[1] and now has a free replication service[2].
The other one is gemstone glass[3] which works with Smalltalk and have their own ruby runtime, maglev[4].
I've been following RethinkDB on HN for quite a while now and have been eagerly awaiting them to make a production-ready statement. Everything I have read has sounded very promising and I am excited to try it out!
Have I missed something?