At Juristat, we use big data analytics to help patent lawyers predict the future. As of the Summer of 2014, our dataset includes over 5.5 million U.S. patent applications, with some applications dating back to the early 1900s. Each patent application is made up of a series of interrelated documents stored in tsv or xml formats. Further, patent applications can be connected to other applications through parent-child relationships. Unlike most big data projects with large constantly streaming data feeds, the patent system moves at a glacial pace, with an average application receiving an new event once every few months. We’ve begun the transition from our existing MySQL database system to a NoSQL document store, and based on our needs  we considered MongoDB and RethinkDB as potential solutions. Below are the findings of our benchmarking and testing