Getting Started with RethinkDB

Table of Contents

Getting Started with RethinkDB

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgement

About the Reviewer

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introducing RethinkDB

Rethinking the database

Changefeeds

Horizontal scalability

Powerful query language

Developer-oriented

Document-oriented

Lock-free architecture

Immediate consistency

Secondary indexes

Distributed joins

Installing RethinkDB

Installing RethinkDB on Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Installing RethinkDB on CentOS and Fedora

Installing RethinkDB on OS X

Installing RethinkDB using Homebrew

Building RethinkDB from source

Configuring RethinkDB

Running as a daemon

Creating a configuration file

Starting RethinkDB

Running a query

Summary

2. The ReQL Query Language

Documents

Document databases

JSON document format

Keys

Arrays

Embedded documents

Data modeling

Introducing ReQL

An explicit query language

Building a query

Inserting data

Batch inserts

Reading data

Filtering results

Manipulating results

Updating data

Updating existing attributes

Adding new attributes

Deleting data

Removing all documents

Deleting a table

Deleting a database

Summary

3. Clustering, Sharding, and Replication

An introduction to scaling

What kind of system is it?

Scaling reads

Scaling writes

Scaling data

Clustering RethinkDB

Creating a cluster

Adding a server to the cluster

Running queries on the cluster

Replication

Adding a secondary replica

Failover

Sharding

Sharding a table

Summary

4. Performance Tuning and Advanced Queries

Performance tuning

Increasing the cache size

Increasing concurrency

Using soft durability mode

Bulk data import

Introducing indexing

Evaluating query performance

Creating and using an index

Compound indexes

Advanced queries

Limits, skips, and sorts

The limit command

The skip command

Sorting documents

Finding a random document

Grouping

Aggregations

Average

Maximum

The pluck command

Summary

5. Programming RethinkDB in Node.js

Introducing Node.js

An increasingly popular technology

An event-driven design

Installing Node.js

Installing on Linux

Installing on Mac OS X

Running Node.js

Installing the RethinkDB module

Connecting to RethinkDB

Running a simple query

Inserting documents

Reading documents

Updating and deleting documents

Introducing Changefeeds

A simple example using Changefeeds

Summary

6. RethinkDB Administration and Deployment

RethinkDB administration tools

Backing up your data

Backing up a single table

Setting up automatic backups

Restoring your data

Securing RethinkDB

Securing the web interface

Securing the driver port

Monitoring RethinkDB

Monitoring issues

Monitoring running jobs

Deploying RethinkDB

Summary

7. Developing Real-Time Web Applications

Introducing real-time web applications

Examples of real-time web apps

Going real time on the Web

Polling

AJAX

WebSockets

Developing web applications with Node.js

Express.js

Routing

Templating

Socket.io

Using RethinkDB in Node.js web applications

Database polling

Message queues

Changefeeds

Your first real-time web application

Structuring the Notes web application

Creating the Node.js server

Configuring the router

Writing the application logic

Interacting with RethinkDB

Implementing Changefeeds

Programming Socket.io

Programming the frontend

The view

Running our web application

Summary

Index

Getting Started with RethinkDB

Getting Started with RethinkDB

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: March 2016

Production reference: 1100316

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-760-4

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Credits

Author

Gianluca Tiepolo

Reviewer

Brandon Martin

Acquisition Editor

Rahul Nair

Content Development Editor

Arshiya Ayaz Umer

Technical Editor

Rupali R. Shrawane

Copy Editor

Yesha Gangani

Project Coordinator

Kinjal Bari

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Tejal Daruwale Soni

Graphics

Jason Monteiro

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Gianluca Tiepolo is an accomplished software engineering professional and entrepreneur with several years of experience in developing software and products on a variety of technologies, from consumer applications to revolutionary projects focused on computer vision, data engineering, and database programming. His software stack ranges from traditional platforms, such as Hadoop and OpenCV, to modern platforms, such as Node.js and Redis.

He is the founder of Defrogs, a start-up that is building a new-generation data engineering platform to handle big data called TrisDB. Bringing in innovative data process development approaches, this organization focuses on cutting-edge technologies designed to scale small to large distributed data clusters. To date, TrisDB is used by more than 3 million developers around the world. He previously co-founded Sixth Sense Solutions, a start-up that develops interactive solutions for the retail and fashion industries. In 2013, he helped produce the largest touch-enabled surface in the world. Currently, he's working on a fashion platform called Stylobag and maintains several open source projects on his GitHub account.

In 2015, he reviewed the book called Building Web Applications with Python and Neo4j published by Packt Publishing.

Acknowledgement

Writing a book is both an uphill and demanding task that cannot be accomplished by a single person without the support of several others, and this book is no different. I would like to thank everyone who has played a role in helping me write this book or helped me in my career. I am indebted and grateful to everyone; however, I would like to mention a few people who have been extremely important to me over these last few months.

First of all, I have to thank the team of editors, reviewers, and the entire team at Packt Publishing for this book. I especially want to thank Izzat Contractor, who initially suggested me as the author of this book, Rahul Nair, the acquisition editor for this project, and also Arshiya Ayaz, my content editor.

I also want to thank all my friends and colleagues who have unconditionally supported me throughout the writing of this book and have given me great inspiration. I especially want to thank Diego Frasson for everything that he has taught me and Marco Ippolito who always reminded me that impossible projects become possible if you believe in them. You guys have given me a great dose of motivation, and this book simply wouldn't have been possible without you!

I want to thank the creators of RethinkDB. I am extremely thankful to the RethinkDB team and its great community. I also have to thank the entire open source community that contributed to the technologies on which RethinkDB is based. Without these technologies, the database and, in turn, this book would not have been possible.

Last but not least, I want to thank my mum Claire for understanding me and supporting me during my long hours of work and writing.

About the Reviewer

Brandon Martin is a full-stack experienced programmer who has been programming for 10 years. Currently, he works for Lumi Inc (www.lumi.com) as the lead engineer where they are using RethinkDB in production. He has been happily married for 15 years and has two children.

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Preface

Databases are all around us. In the modern web, almost every website that we visit and the web-based applications that we use have a database system working behind the frontend. Web developers are constantly looking for new database solutions that adapt to the modern web, allowing them to store data in a simpler manner.

RethinkDB is both the simplest and the most powerful document database technology available across Linux and OS X platforms. Based on robust and feature-rich software, RethinkDB provides a bunch of features that can be used to develop some real-time web applications that can be scaled incredibly easily. RethinkDB is also open source, so the source code is freely downloadable from the database GitHub repository.

This book provides an introduction to RethinkDB. The following chapters will give you some understanding and coding tips to install and configure the database and start developing web applications with RethinkDB in no time.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing RethinkDB, explains how to download and install RethinkDB on both Linux and OS X.

Chapter 2, The ReQL Query Language, explains the basics of RethinkDB's query language and how to use it to run simple queries on the database.

Chapter 3, Clustering, Sharding, and Replication, explores the different techniques you can use to scale RethinkDB.

Chapter 4, Performance Tuning and Advanced Queries, gives out best practices to obtain optimal performance and explores more advanced queries.

Chapter 5, Programming RethinkDB in Node.js, explains how to interact with the database using the Node.js programming language.

Chapter 6, RethinkDB Administration and Deployment, teaches you how to maintain your RethinkDB database instance and how to deploy it to the cloud.

Chapter 7, Developing Real-Time Web Applications, explores how to develop a full-fledged Node.js web application based on RethinkDB.

What you need for this book

To get the most out of this book, you'll need a computer or server running OS X or any other Linux distribution.

You will also need an Internet connection and administration privileges to download and install the database.

Finally, you will need a text editor to edit configuration files and write code. There are many freely available editors, such as Nano, Emacs, or Gedit. Choose the one you prefer!

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at anyone interested in learning how to get started with the RethinkDB database. No prior database programming experience is required, however you should be comfortable with installing software, editing configuration files, and using the terminal or commandline. A basic knowledge of Node.js is recommended, but not required.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The default RethinkDB package includes various control scripts including the init script /etc/init.d/rethinkdb.

A block of code is set as follows:

r.db(test).table(people).indexStatus(name_and_age)

{

  function: 24 72 65 71 6c 5f...> ,

  geo: false ,

  index: name_and_age ,

  multi: false ,

  outdated: false ,

  ready: true

}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

rethinkdb import -f data.json --table test.people sudo pip install rethinkdb

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: You can do this from the Data Explorer section of the web interface by clicking on the Options icon and checking the query profiler checkbox, as you can see from the following screenshot.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <feedback@packtpub.com>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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