MySQL vs RethinkDB

MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.

Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development.

Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner.

Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.

You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes.

RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queries are just "natural" Javascript functions in the same way you would use lodash to handle your collections.

Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer.

RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db.

RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency.

You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth.