Meteor.js has two ways to detect database changes and push them to connected clients: polling and oplog tailing. Polling works out of the box. Oplog tailing performs better but requires a MongoDB replica set. Both have tradeoffs that get worse as your data grows.

Thermocline solves this differently. Its WAL-based change stream architecture gives Meteor applications oplog-compatible reactivity with none of the operational overhead, and adds automatic hot/cold tiering that lets large collections move to object storage without breaking live queries.

We're excited to share the story behind Thermocline and our commitment to the open-source community.

We're excited to announce Thermocline, a fully open-source, AI-native document database with automatic tiered storage, built-in vector search, MVCC time travel, and Raft consensus replication.

Thermocline is not a proxy or compatibility layer — it is a complete database built from the ground up with its own native storage engine. Applications connect using standard MongoDB drivers with only a connection string change.