It's understandably a little difficult to extract all of the relevant context out of that thread in the issue tracker, but the current consensus is indeed that

It's understandably a little difficult to extract all of the relevant context out of that thread in the issue tracker, but the current consensus is indeed that this feature should be built with a plugin system--on top of the database's existing query language and feature set. The plugin system will provide a sort of middleware layer alongside the database so that we don't have to bake in a lot of things that are domain specific or only relevant to particular use cases. There's more discussion about the plugin system here: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/4785 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/4785 (Disclosure: I work at RethinkDB)