The competition in the data management world is moving up yet another notch with the release of what is touted as the first production-ready release of RethinkDB, the open-source document store from the startup of the same name. The launch brings the enterprise a major step closer to the era of real-time applications.

Although companies like Twitter make it look easy from the user’s point of view, streaming information to a Web service is a tremendously complicated undertaking that is impractical with a traditional relational database, the majority of which require applications to specifically ask for information. That approach works well with the request-reply access model of the Web but is inefficient when thousands of data points cross the stream every second. The delay involved in individually pulling each item can make real-time execution nearly impossible.

RethinkDB offers an alternative in the form of so-called “changefeeds” that provide the server-side equivalent of an RSS reader and allow applications to subscribe to updates such as new additions to a certain database table. In that sense, the mechanism works much like the messaging systems used to shuffle information to and from the event processing clusters powering Twitter and other bleeding-edge Web companies, but with one major difference.

Whereas setting up that kind of analytics environment requires an abundance of infrastructure and highly specialized talent, RethinkDB can be installed on a Linux machine – like a developer’s laptop – with about three commands on the terminal. The platform is also easy to use thanks to a straightforward query language often compared with MongoDB, another open document store that has racked up over nine million downloads thanks to its simplicity.

RethinkDB currently only has around 100,000 users, a far cry from the figures boasted by its more popular peer. But the new release of the database could go a long way toward narrowing that gap. The launch brings three optional services that should make it much more feasible for CIOs to adopt the system.

The startup is offering on-premise seminars to help organizations train their developers in  using RethinkDB, assistance with the creation of applications and professional support, three essential ingredients for driving the adoption of a new technology at a large organization. The services come on top of expanded language support that significantly widens the scope of potential use scenarios, a combination that puts the database in a much better position to grow as real-time applications continue multiplying  in the enterprise.