This is a great writeup and helps tremendously, thank you! Now, wrt specifics. > the find-and-modify command This has been baked into ReQL from day one and do

This is a great writeup and helps tremendously, thank you! Now, wrt specifics. > the find-and-modify command This has been baked into ReQL from day one and doesn't require a special command. Here's an example: # 'jobs' table contains documents of the form # { type: 'type', jobs: ['job1', 'job2'] } r.table('jobs').filter({type: 'printer'}).update(function(row) { return r.branch( row('jobs').contains('job1'), // if there is job1 in the array {jobs: row('jobs').difference(['job1'])}, // atomically remove job1 null // else don't modify the object ); }) This isn't limited to arrays -- you can do all sorts of atomic find and modify this way within a single document. We clearly need to do a better job documenting this. I'll make sure that happens. > Packaged linux/mac Rethink binaries That's been available for a while -- http://rethinkdb.com/docs/install/ http://rethinkdb.com/docs/install/, you can download a binary pkg for OS X if you don't want to use brew, and we support apt-get on ubuntu/debian via a private PPA. We'll be adding binary packages for more distros soon. > binary storage format Mongo wins on this one, but it's definitely on the horizon -- https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/137 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/137. The storage engine bits for this have been done for a long time, we just have to figure out a sane ReQL API (which is harder than it seems). > Query optimizer This is a somewhat longer-term project (i.e. we probably won't get to it by mid-fall), but we're definitely thinking about it. So far though, there hasn't been a real use case yet where it's a problem.