We are pleased to announce that our friends at Compose now offer RethinkDB hosting in the cloud. Their new service lets you get a managed RethinkDB deployment in a matter of seconds, providing a fast and easy way to start working on your RethinkDB project without the overhead of managing your own infrastructure or provisioning your own cluster.

Compose, formerly known as MongoHQ, is a dedicated Database as a Service (DBaaS) company. RethinkDB is the third database in their product lineup, launching alongside their existing support for MongoDB and Elasticsearch. Available today as a public beta, their hosted RethinkDB deployments come with automatic scaling and backups.

Developers often use pagination to display large collections of data. An application can fetch content in batches as needed, presenting a fixed number of records at a time. On the frontend, paginated user interfaces typically provide something like “next” and “previous” navigation buttons so that users can move through the data set. In modern mobile apps, it is increasingly common to implement an infinite scrolling user interface on top of paginated data. As the user scrolls through a list, the application fetches and appends new records.

To demonstrate the use of pagination in RethinkDB applications, I made a simple mobile app called BeerThink. It displays a list of beers and breweries, providing a detailed summary when the user taps an item. The app uses a data dump from the Open Beer Database, which contains information about roughly 4,400 beers and 1,200 breweries. I converted the data to JSON so that it is easy to import into RethinkDB. There are two tables, one for beers and one for breweries. The application uses RethinkDB’s support for table joins to correlate the beers with their respective breweries.

RethinkDB 1.15 introduced new geospatial features that can help you plot a course for smarter location-based applications. The database has new geographical types, including points, lines, and polygons. Geospatial queries makes it easy to compute the distance between points, detect intersecting regions, and more. RethinkDB stores geographical types in a format that conforms with the GeoJSON standard.

Developers can take advantage of the new geospatial support to simplify the development of a wide range of potential applications, from location-aware mobile experiences to specialized GIS research platforms. This tutorial demonstrates how to build an earthquake map using RethinkDB’s new geospatial support and an open data feed hosted by the USGS.

Today, we’re happy to announce RethinkDB 1.15 (Lawrence of Arabia). Download it now!

The 1.15 release includes over 50 enhancements and introduces geospatial queries to RethinkDB. This has been by far the most requested feature by RethinkDB users. In addition, we’ve sped up many queries dramatically by lazily deserializing data from disk. This release also brings a new r.uuid command that allows server-side generation of UUIDs.

With RethinkDB’s changefeeds, it’s easy to create a publish-subscribe message exchange without going through a third-party queue. Josh Kuhn has written a small library, repubsub, that shows you how to build topic exchanges—and he’s written it in all three of our officially-supported languages. He’s put together a terrific tutorial article demonstrating how to use it. You can simply create a topic and publish messages to it:

topic = exchange.topic('fights.superheroes.batman')
topic.publish({'opponent': 'Joker', 'victory': True})

Then subscribe to just the messages that match your interest.

filter_func = lambda topic: topic.match(r'fights\.superheroes.*')
queue = exchange.queue(filter_func)
for topic, payload in queue.subscription:
    print topic, payload

Josh describes how to implement tags, nested topics and more, so check out the publish-subscribe tutorial.