RethinkDB vs Apache Cassandra

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.

Once setup database is set up, it becomes highly available without any downtime.

Cassandra is very scalable and achieves the highest throughput for the maximum number of nodes compared to other alternatives. Unfortunately this also brings rather high write and read latencies.

The query language that Cassandra uses (CQL) is similar to SQL even though it's a NoSQL database.

After measuring the read/write performance values on one server, you can simply calculate how many more servers you should add to the cluster to reach the required performance levels, and scale easily.