In today’s society the need for more hardware efficient software since some people think that the doubling of computer power for the same price that Moore’s law predicted is no more. Reactive programming can be a step in the right direction, this has led to an increase in interest in reactive programming. This object of this thesis is to evaluate the possibility of using reactive programming and R2DBC in Java to communicate with a relation database. This has been done by creating two Spring applications one using the standards JDBC and servlet stack and one using R2DBC and the reactive stack. Then connecting them to a MySQL database and selecting and inserting values in to and from it and measuring the CPU usage, memory usage and execution time. In addition to this the possibilities to handle BLOBs in a good enough way were researched. The study shows that there are both advantages and disadvantages with using R2DBC it has basic support and it is based on good idea but at the time of this thesis it still needs more development before it can be used fully.