&gt; That&#x27;s not what <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rethinkdb.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rethinkdb.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;</a> says. It shows a connection that exposes context-bound Builder methods with trigger (insert, changes, run, etc) methods.<p>I think the confusion stems from the fact that the Quickstart guide assumes that you&#x27;re running queries in the Data Explorer, a web frontend for prototyping queries. In the Data Explorer, clicking the &quot;Run&quot; button is what triggers the execution of the AST.<p>If you wrote something like `r.table(&quot;tv_shows&quot;).insert(...)` in your application code, it wouldn&#x27;t do anything except for returning an AST object. You can store that object, or call the `run(conn)` method on it to send it over a RethinkDB connection and execute it.<p>Note that the `r` object in these queries has no state. You can think of it as a namespace that serves as a starting point for building queries.