Docker containers simplify application deployment, making the process more reproducible and conducive to composability. Docker 1.9, which was released earlier this month, introduces a new approach to container networking that has significant implications for users. It provides a more flexible way to connect services between containers, making it easier to manage Docker deployments that have multiple interconnected parts.

Today, we’re pleased to announce RethinkDB 2.2 (Modern Times). Download it now!

RethinkDB 2.2 includes over 120 enhancements, significantly improves performance, memory usage and scalability, adds new ReQL commands, and ships with atomic changefeed support. Some of the major improvements in the 2.2 release include:

• Atomic changefeeds: the changes command now accepts an optional argument called includeInitial, which allows atomically reading existing data and processing new results with a single query.
• Optimized fetches: the getAll code path has been optimized to perform a single network round trip, which results in an 8x performance improvement.
• Parallel scans: fetching large amounts of sequential data from RethinkDB now scales linearly with the size of the cluster.
• Improved memory usage: memory usage on large datasets has been reduced by over 50%.
• New ReQL commands: We added a new values command, and Peter Hollows expanded r.uuid to support user defined hashes.

Opal is a transpiler that converts Ruby code into browser-friendly JavaScript, opening the door for developers to build frontend web applications with Ruby. It’s a particularly intriguing option for backend Ruby developers who want to use the same language across their entire stack.

I recently gave Opal a try myself, incorporating it into a simple realtime todo list demo that I built with RethinkDB and Ruby. My demo is a full-stack Ruby application, with Sinatra on the backend and an Opal-based library called React.rb on the frontend. React.rb wraps Facebook’s popular React framework, adapting it to support idiomatic Ruby conventions. Developers can build React components in native Ruby, using a domain-specific language (DSL) to describe the generated HTML markup.

We regularly hear exciting things from developers who use RethinkDB in production environments to solve real-world problems. Today we’re excited to share some of those stories with the community.

We’re launching a new section on our website with short videos that give you an opportunity to hear RethinkDB users share their experiences in their own words. We’re very proud that RethinkDB helps thousands of companies around the world solve real-world problems, and we’ll be sharing more of their stories with you in the coming weeks.

We’re really excited to share our new Slack group for the RethinkDB dev community!

We use Slack internally here at RethinkDB and it has been a valuable tool to keep us connected with other team members, companies, and users. Apprehensive to add another tool to your repertoire? Don’t fret! We’re still active on IRC (#rethinkdb on Freenode).

We plan on hosting office hours with the community team and engineers, but this is also a great way to connect with other RethinkDB users in your local community and all over the world.

Click here to join now.