To sum up 2019, although the first half of the year was not eventful, we really ramped things up in the second half. With your help, we were able to reclaim access to the website, gain control over credentials used for deploys, join CII Best Practices, set up CommunityBridge for fundraising, make the Discord community official, release 2.4.0, and more.

Building a community together

As of October 2019, we’ve asked for your help regarding community support, database development, and client development. We also shared a volunteering form to let us know if you are interested in helping out (thank you to everyone who has already signed up!).

We’re pleased to announce the availability of the long-awaited release: RethinkDB 2.4.0 (Night Of The Living Dead). This update includes a range of bug fixes, stability improvements, new features, and more. For a complete list of changes in this update, you can refer to the release notes. To learn more about what else going on around RethinkDB, please read our latest blog post. Here are some of the highlights of this release:

• Write hooks - attach to tables a function that can modify the behavior of any write
• Bitwise operations - allows basic bitwise operations such as AND, NOT, OR, XOR, SAL and SAR
• Permitted the hyphen character to be used in table names
• Improved table page performance in the case with many databases

As you may have noticed in our previous blog post, we did not cover every technical detail of what is going on around RethinkDB. Also mentioned earlier in a GitHub issue, communication was not our strength with regard to the future of the project, and we promised this would change. In keeping our word, here is a summary of what’s been going on the last few months and what’s in store.

Database related changes

Before we discuss the changes we made and what’s next, we need to clarify what our goals are and the current difficulties we face.

We have some exciting news for you today, but let me begin by expressing our appreciation for you, the RethinkDB community! Your continued support over the past couple of years as we’ve gotten back on track means so much. We would never have gotten this far without continued engagement from the community. With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve completed all the necessary tasks for continued development under the Linux Foundation and fundraising via CommunityBridge.

Technical updates

Since RethinkDB merged back from the fork, we’ve put a lot of effort into cleaning up and reorganizing the project. We have access to PyPi, to the infrastructure, and most of the official RethinkDB accounts.

We set up static code analysis for some of the repositories (this will be continued), released new client versions, fixed the enormous amount of bugs and released a 2.4.0-beta for DigitalOcean Marketplace, redeployed and moved the website and documentation site to Netlify, set up a new download server on DigitalOcean and our next step will be to create the CI/CD infrastructure.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of RethinkDB 2.3.6, the first release since RethinkDB transitioned to community governance. This update includes a range of bugfixes and stability improvements. For a complete list of changes in this update, you can refer to the release notes.

After the company behind RethinkDB shut down last year, a group of community members and former employees devised a transition plan to ensure that the database would live on as an open source software project. That effort culminated earlier this year when we officially joined the Linux Foundation and relicensed RethinkDB under the permissive ASLv2.

Today’s update is an important milestone, as it is the first fully community-driven RethinkDB release. Version 2.3.6 is also the first release that we’ve issued under our new license. Although development on RethinkDB never really halted, it took some time to spin up the infrastructure and processes that we needed to facilitate new releases. Now that we’re back in action, we’re looking forward to rolling out more regular updates.

We are already working towards the release of RethinkDB 2.4, our next major version. We have several new features already implemented for version 2.4, including support for table modifier functions. A modifier function lets you provide an arbitrary ReQL expression for the database to execute on every write operation that affects a table’s contents. You can use modifier functions for performing validation or automatically adding fields to new documents.

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Get involved

As an open source project that is developed and financially supported by its users, RethinkDB welcomes your participation. If there’s a feature or improvement that you would like to see, you can help us make it a reality. If you’d like to join us, there are many ways that you can get involved:

• Learn how to contribute to RethinkDB
• Join the #open-rethinkdb channel in the RethinkDB Slack
• Submit pull requests and open issues on GitHub
• Follow @rethinkdb on Twitter
• Get started with RethinkDB

For more details about the project’s status and roadmap, you can watch the recordings of our latest community meetings on the RethinkDB YouTube channel. You can also keep an eye out for our upcoming appearance on the The Changelog podcast.