Suppose you have a number of nodes on a network that spin up cron jobs to perform various tasks. However, you need the nodes to cooperate to ensure that multiple nodes don't spin up the same task. You can easily implement this functionality on top of RethinkDB as follows:
// A single node atomically pushes jobs onto an array in the database
r.table('admin').get('jobs').update({ job_list: r.row('job_list').append(JOB_DESCRIPTION)) })