We are happy to announce RethinkDB 1.7 (Nights of Cabiria). Download it now!

This release includes the following features and improvements:

• Tools for CSV and JSON import and export
• Support for hot backup and restore
• ReQL support for atomic set and get operations
• A powerful new syntax for handling nested documents
• Greater than 10x performance improvement on document inserts
• Native binaries for CentOS / RHEL
• A number of small ReQL improvements (explained below)

See the full list of over 30 bug fixes, features, and enhancements.

Etienne Laurin (@atnnn), an engineer at RethinkDB, introduces these new features in this one-minute video:

We are happy to announce RethinkDB 1.6 (Fargo). Go download it now)!

This release includes regex string matching, fourteen new array operations, support for random sampling, error handling improvements, support for authentication keys, and over 65 bug fixes, features, and enhancements.

It’s no secret that ReQL, the RethinkDB query language, is modeled after functional languages like Lisp and Haskell. The functional paradigm is particularly well suited to the needs of a distributed database while being more easily embeddable as a DSL than SQL’s ad hoc syntax. Key to functional programming’s power and simplicity is the anonymous (aka lambda) function.

This post covers all aspects of lambda functions in ReQL from concept to implementation and is meant for third party driver developers and those interested in functional programming and programming language design. For a more practical guide to using ReQL please see our docs where you can find FAQs, screencasts, an API reference, as well as various tutorials and examples.

We are pleased to announce RethinkDB 1.5 ( The Graduate), so go download it now!

This release includes the long-awaited support for secondary indexes, a new algorithm for batched inserts that results in an ~18x performance improvement, support for soft durability (don’t worry – off by default), and over 180 bug fixes, features, and enhancements.

The main focus of the 1.4 release was to refactor the client-server wire protocol to simplify future development of the query language and also to make writing client drivers for new languages significantly easier.

It’s been a bit over a month since the release and we’ve already heard of a couple of new drivers being developed. Erlang, C#, Scala, and the just-announced PHP are the ones we know about, but we hope to hear from you about even more of them!

This seemed like a confirmation that a refactored, simplified and source documented protobuf definition and the rewritten official drivers were indeed what was needed to enable users to start working on new drivers. But we realized, and our users helped us with this, that while being a good start, these do not (and can not) provide all the details needed while developing new drivers.