A new update to the Inside RavenDB book is available. I’m up to chapter 9 (although Chapter 8 is just a skeleton). You can read it here.

In particular, the details about running RavenDB in a cluster and the distributed technologies and approaches it uses are now fully covered. I still have to get back to discussing ETL strategies, but there are two full chapters discussing how RavenDB clusters and replication work in detail. I would dearly appreciate any feedback on that part.

This is a complex topic, and I want to get additional eyes on this to make sure sure that it is understandable. Especially if you are new to distributed system design and how they work.

Another major advantage that we now have a professional editor go through chapter 1 – 7, so the usage of the English language probably leveled up at least twice. Errors, awkward phrasing and outright mistakes remains my own, and I would love to hear about any issues you find.

Also new in this drop is a full chapter talking about how to query RavenDB and dive into the new RQL language. There is still a lot to cover about indexes, and this chapter hasn’t been edited yet, but I think that this should give a good insight into how we are actually doing things and what you can do with the new query language.

In addition to that, we are ramping up documentation work as we start closing things down to the actual final release. We are currently aiming that at the end of the year, so it is right around the corner. I also would like to remind people that we are currently giving 30% discount for purchase of RavenDB licenses, for the duration of the Release Candidate. This offer will go away after the RTM release.

Another source of confusion seems to be the community license. I wanted to clarify that you can absolutely use the community license for production usage, including using features such as high availability and running in a cluster.

So grab a license, or just grab the bits and run with them. But most importantly, grab the book (https://github.com/ravendb/book/releases) and let me know what you think.