Announcing the RethinkDB 2.0 release candidate

The RethinkDB 2.0 release candidate is now available for testing. RethinkDB 2.0 is designed to make building and scaling realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming 2.0 launch is an important milestone, marking our very first production-ready release. We’ll announce commercial support options and other services alongside the release.

After five years of development, RethinkDB is ready for widespread adoption with the upcoming 2.0 release. The cumulative development effort behind the project includes more than 2,000 improvements, implemented across 16 major releases. Our most recent release, RethinkDB 1.16, dramatically expanded the changes command and introduced powerful support for building realtime web applications.

In addition to performance and stability improvements, the 2.0 release candidate also includes some noteworthy new features that complement the realtime functionality we introduced in the 1.16 release:

  • Support for attaching a changefeed to the get_all command.
  • Support for attaching a changefeed to the union command.
  • Optional EventMachine integration for performing asynchronous queries in the Ruby driver.
  • Optional Tornado integration for performing asynchronous queries in the Python driver.
  • A new feature in the cursor API that supports consuming the next element in a stream without blocking.

The EventMachine and Tornado integrations haven’t landed in the client drivers yet, though the necessary backend features are already present. We’ll issue new release candidate client drivers with full support for those features in the coming days.

This release candidate is intended for testing and evaluation purposes. We’re eager to get feedback from users to help guide our efforts as we put the finishing touches on version 2.0. This is also a great opportunity for users to start exploring RethinkDB ahead of our big launch.

A growing number of users already deploy RethinkDB in production. We look forward to seeing the user community grow further in the coming months as our first production-ready release brings RethinkDB to a broader audience.

Help test the release candidate: