We’re co-hosting a RethinkDB + Firebase meetup on realtime sync architectures for web and mobile apps. We’ll be talking about:

• designing backend realtime sync architectures
• scaling those architectures when it’s time
• new features in RethinkDB and Firebase to make building realtime apps easier

Come hang out with the RethinkDB and Firebase teams – or even better, give a lightning talk on how you’re using RethinkDB!

Today, we’re happy to announce RethinkDB 1.13 (My Name is Nobody). Download it now!

The 1.13 release includes over 150 enhancements, including:

• New http command for seamlessly pulling data from external APIs into RethinkDB
• New changes command for subscribing to document changes on tables
• Full promises support in the JavaScript driver
• A high performance JSON driver protocol
• Dozens of performance and stability improvements

Yesterday, Salvatore posted an amazing write-up on implementing the really neat HyperLogLog data structure in Redis. We keep being amazed by Redis and Salvatore — he’s taught us a great deal about good APIs, usability, and software development in general. We learned so much from Redis, we drew this to celebrate his work. Thanks for your hard work, @antirez!

Today, we’re happy to announce RethinkDB 1.12 (The Wizard of Oz). Download it now!

With over 200 enhancements, the 1.12 release is one of the biggest releases to date. This release includes:

• Dramatically simplified map/reduce and aggregation commands.
• Big improvements to caching that do away with long-standing stability and performance limitations.
• A port to the ARM architecture.
• Four new ReQL commands for object and string manipulation.
• Dozens of bug fixes, stability enhancements, and performance improvements.

Today we’re delighted to announce our Series A! We’ve raised $8M to fund development, grow the RethinkDB community, and ultimately make database tools feel indistinguishable from magic.

Here’s what we’re planning to accomplish with this new development budget:

• Get to a long-term support release: Since we first shipped the beta version of RethinkDB we’ve been humbled by the feedback, support, and encouragement from our users. Over the past thirteen months we’ve shipped ten new releases, fixed hundreds of bugs, and added dozens of new features. We’re now hard at work polishing the final rough edges in preparation for the upcoming LTS release.

• Grow the community: An amazing community has sprung up around RethinkDB over the past year. We’re incredibly grateful to all the people who’ve spent time developing and supporting client drivers for 15 different languages, building frameworks, ORMs, and designing new admin tools. We’re now in a position to give back to our community by sponsoring conferences, promoting community projects, improving documentation, and introducing more developers to RethinkDB.

• Offer commercial support: Thousands of developers are already building applications backed by RethinkDB; from mobile games to gene sequence analysis, and everything in between. In the coming months we’ll be adding commercial support options to give these teams everything they need to confidently use RethinkDB in production deployments.)