This looks like an interesting product for cache-like use cases.<p>Have you considered including Redis in your benchmarks? From the FAQ it sounds like there are some use cases where both Redis and RethinkDB would be suitable. The main functional differences I can see are:<p>* RethinkDB supports datasets larger than RAM, whereas Redis doesn't really. This could be big, for some use cases.<p>* Redis supports lists, sets, priority queues etc, whereas RethinkDB values can only be strings for now (if I understand correctly?).<p>* With Redis, writes are not immediately durable by default (though they can be configured that way at a performance cost), whereas with RethinkDB they are? (In particular I'd like to see RethinkDB benchmarked against Redis with 'appendonly yes' and 'appendfsync always'.)<p>* Redis has built-in master-slave replication, whereas RethinkDB does not yet.<p>* Redis is open-source; RethinkDB you have to pay for updates. (Will updates eventually trickle down to the free plan, or is 1.0 all she wrote for free users?)<p>One more question, based on your hint that "support for more protocols is coming". Salvatore has said he considers Redis to be a protocol first and a database second (<a href="http://antirez.com/post/redis-manifesto.html" rel="nofollow">http://antirez.com/post/redis-manifesto.html</a>). Have you considered implementing the Redis protocol in RethinkDB? That would actually be awesome, to be able to switch between Redis and RethinkDB as requirements changed.
I have little experience with databases, please forgive me: How useful is a database with no horizontal scaling support? Is your target market small businesses and using it as a caching tier? I can imagine that everyone dreaming of a popular website eventually needs to scale beyond a single server pc.
I think a very strong selling point of Cassandra and MongoDB are<p>1. sharding (distributed database load over multiple machines)<p>2. replication (simultaneously running backup databases over multiple machines)<p>Am I correct that I would have to make my own [nightly] backups of my database?