RethinkDB VS perspective

I've been poking around, testing and breaking database servers for a long time (more than 20 years today). But a few years ago I came across a jewel, the grail, one of the best solutions available. Under the radar, shunned for whatever reason, RethinkDB is nonetheless one of the finest database server projects I've ever tested.

RethinkDB[0] looks like a "too good to be true" type of database. Anyone using it in production? What is your experience like? What are the pros and cons?

[0] https://rethinkdb.com

Since you’re not new to the field you might want to peek https://rethinkdb.com/ since it got picked up as an open source project.

No I don't think that's relevant. They implement their own btree it seems [0].

They don't use a key-value store library.

I know it's a bit of a fine line. But I'm talking about standalone libraries people embed across different applications/databases. That's what RocksDB/LevelDB/Pebble are.

[0] https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/tree/v2.4.x/src/btree

A Data Objects represents data which can be saved inside a database. This concept is in the heart of SQLAlchemy, but as the name should be obvious: it's for SQL Database (in general). Today, there are now document databases too (like MongoDB, ArangoDB, RethinkDB that I love so much, or even PostgreSQL). So, a "data" is like a "structured and typed document" that you save "as is". That's not the same paradigm, not the same controls. There are advantages and disadvantages, but we won't debate that here.

There are multiple ways to share data between two (or more) instances of your app: - you can use a shared storage, such as Cloud Firestore, - you can build your own backend (based on a real-time database, such as RethinkDB), - or you can rely on local communication using the Multipeer framework you linked.

Why do you want to render to canvas?

Perspective seems to be the most performant html table. It is more focused on extremely fast updates than styling, although it looks good.

Glide is a newcomer that also renders to canvas.

https://github.com/finos/perspective

https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid

SQL workbench also uses https://perspective.finos.org/ for tables. It's a WASM table library which pairs nicely with duckdb and works well with large tables.

Yes. We are working on adding support for aggregation and pivoting using https://github.com/finos/perspective

I haven't looked extensively at react-datasheet. It looks like it is trying to build more of a full product than the other data tables.

I have used ag-grid extensively, its an impressive product. Some pieces are a little awkward to use, particularly auto-sizing. But generally ag-grid has thought of most functionality and has a solution. The creator of ag-grid had a great interview on Javascript Jabber [1].

The other serious data table component that I have seen is FinOS Perspective [2]. This is extremely high performance, also more specialized and probably harder to customize. I think Perspective renders to a canvas element from Rust/C++ compiled to WASM (not 100% sure). It is also made for streaming updates.

AG-Grid supports streaming updates... but only in the commercial version.

Eventually the data model for these types of tables becomes tricky. I will be investigating parquet-wasm for my use case. Hit me up if you want to collaborate.

[1] https://blog.ag-grid.com/javascript-jabber-podcast/

[2] https://perspective.finos.org/

Something like https://github.com/finos/perspective ? We use an OLAP(-y) WASM engine to provide query-ability to our data visualization tool, and doing the calculations in the browser is cheaper and simpler than a server-side database for datasets that fit in browser memory.