We’re pleased to announce the availability of RethinkDB 2.3.6, the first release since RethinkDB transitioned to community governance. This update includes a range of bugfixes and stability improvements. For a complete list of changes in this update, you can refer to the release notes.

After the company behind RethinkDB shut down last year, a group of community members and former employees devised a transition plan to ensure that the database would live on as an open source software project. That effort culminated earlier this year when we officially joined the Linux Foundation and relicensed RethinkDB under the permissive ASLv2.

Today’s update is an important milestone, as it is the first fully community-driven RethinkDB release. Version 2.3.6 is also the first release that we’ve issued under our new license. Although development on RethinkDB never really halted, it took some time to spin up the infrastructure and processes that we needed to facilitate new releases. Now that we’re back in action, we’re looking forward to rolling out more regular updates.

We are already working towards the release of RethinkDB 2.4, our next major version. We have several new features already implemented for version 2.4, including support for table modifier functions. A modifier function lets you provide an arbitrary ReQL expression for the database to execute on every write operation that affects a table’s contents. You can use modifier functions for performing validation or automatically adding fields to new documents.

Please note that we’re using a new signing key for the packages in our APT repository. Before you upgrade to the latest packages on Debian or Ubuntu, you will need to fetch the new public key (0742918E5C8DA04A): $ wget -qO- https://download.rethinkdb.com/apt/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -v -"

Get involved

As an open source project that is developed and financially supported by its users, RethinkDB welcomes your participation. If there’s a feature or improvement that you would like to see, you can help us make it a reality. If you’d like to join us, there are many ways that you can get involved:

For more details about the project’s status and roadmap, you can watch the recordings of our latest community meetings on the RethinkDB YouTube channel. You can also keep an eye out for our upcoming appearance on the The Changelog podcast.