Running analytics on a database is both "really straightforward to do" and at the same time, I "really doubt" that anyone would actually do both analytics and t

Running analytics on a database is both "really straightforward to do" and at the same time, I "really doubt" that anyone would actually do both analytics and transactions on the same database instance in production. Why? Analytics are CPU hogs, tend to access tons of data in random fashion (blowing caches and hogging the SSD drive), and given that RethinkDB has no secondary indexing, are likely to be especially slow. That's why people have separate machines dedicated to analytics. What I think a team would actually do with RethinkDB is the same thing people do with Cassandra: include a separate cluster (in the same or a remote datacenter) and replicate data to it from the transactional cluster(s). They would then run analytics on the analytics cluster. This approach won't impact transactional latency, and also allows you to have different hardware altogether for running analytics (e.g. tons of cores and RAM that might go wasted on the transactional DB machines). This is all Big Data 101; it's not controversial.