Some of these examples are not equivalent. For example, r .db('dragonball') .table('characters') .filter(function(row){ return r

Some of these examples are not equivalent. For example, r .db('dragonball') .table('characters') .filter(function(row){ return row('maxStrength').gt(700000).and(row('species').contains('Saiyan')); }) .orderBy(r.desc('maxStrength')); presumably returns one row per character, whereas SELECT c.* FROM characters c INNER JOIN character_species cs ON c.id = cs.character_id INNER JOIN species s ON cs.species_id = s.id WHERE max_strength > 700000 AND s.name = 'Saiyan' ORDER BY max_strength DESC; returns at least one row per character. Rather, the equivalent SQL (depending on what syntax is available) might be: SELECT c.* FROM characters c WHERE max_strength > 700000 AND EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM character_species cs INNER JOIN species s ON cs.species_id = s.id WHERE c.id = cs.character_id AND s.name = 'Saiyan') ORDER BY max_strength DESC; The above returns one row per character, no matter how many matching entries there are in `character_species` or `species`. Pursuing this a little further then, suppose you wanted to expand your search to include humans and androids. In SQL, only a slight modification is needed: SELECT c.* FROM characters c WHERE max_strength > 700000 AND EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM character_species cs INNER JOIN species s ON cs.species_id = s.id WHERE c.id = cs.character_id AND s.name IN ('Saiyan', 'Human', 'Android')) ORDER BY max_strength DESC; I shudder to think what that would look like in functional form. Something like this? r .db('dragonball') .table('characters') .filter(function(row){ return row('maxStrength').gt(700000).and(row('species').contains('Saiyan')).or(row('species').contains('Human')).or(row('species').contains('Android')); }) .orderBy(r.desc('maxStrength')); But how would it know how to group the disjunctions? In my very limited experience, examples like these always look so tantalizing until you start taking them a little further and then you quickly realize there's no such thing as a free lunch. In this case, you pay for the flexibility of RethinkDB with the expressiveness SQL.