YC-Funded RethinkDB: A MySQL Storage Engine Built From The Ground Up For Solid State Drives
The company, which is part of the latest batch of Y Combinator-funded startups, is in fairly early stages (it started developing the product only two months ago), but it’s already making some substantial headway in the features it can offer. Among these are live schema changes, which allow developers to make significant modifications to their database structure without having to go through complex sync and backup procedures. It also offers lock-free concurrency, which means users will be able to read from the database even while other users are writing to it. And it’s an append-only database, which means developers can quickly recover in the event of a system failure.
RethinkDB is also taking a relatively novel approach to its development, at least as far as database storage is concerned. It’s following the “release early, release often” mantra, which it’s kicking off with the release of an early developer pre-alpha, which you can download and try out for free (the company says that implementing the software is quite easy because of the way MySQL handles storage engines). However, given that you’re going to be using this to manage your data, it is absolutely vital that you use this for testing purposes only — make sure you have any crucial data stored elsewhere. The company hopes to use developer input over the next few months to improve the product up until its release.
RethinkDB plans to have its commercial product out the door in the next six months, with an enterprise-level pricing structure that charges on a per-CPU basis (with support included).