Was there ever a time when it actually worked consistently well at something that was database shaped? Because I started dealing with it in ~2010 I think, and it wasn't a suitable database for anything other than toy projects or throw-away data back then, and while it's many versions newer, it still appears to be pretty fast and loose with its supposed system guarantees.
There was a point when they raised $100+ Million in funding that I thought they'd take that money and actually build a database. At least as recently as last Summer that wasn't a reality yet.
Not in any way, shape, or form. Keep in mind, as bad as it is now, it was vastly worse when it launched.
> I’ve hesitated to recommend RethinkDB in the past because prior to 2.1, an operator had to intervene to handle network or node failures. However, 2.1’s automatic failover converges reasonably quickly, and its claimed safety invariants appear to hold under partitions. I’m comfortable recommending it for users seeking a schema-less document store where inter-document consistency isn’t required. Users might also consider MongoDB, which recently introduced options for stronger read consistency similar to Rethink–the two also offer similar availability properties and data models.