RethinkDB Postmortem

Out of all the databases I tried throughout the years RethinkDB was the best. His bit about "worse is better" nails it I think. It was an elegant product targeted at the wrong group of people. ReQL alone was a masterful piece of design and it was great fun composing queries in Ruby instead of some weird JSON frankenstein DSL. At one point I was pushing 500k events per hour through a single node on an c4.xlarge instance with plenty of room to grow. I'm sure other databases would have handled the load just fine as well but I didn't really want to find out because RethinkDB was so much fun to play with. I was very sad when I heard they were shutting down.

Who imposed it? There's not exactly much central control over postgres in general, and just about none over the tooling built outside the core repo.

First, thanks for your candor in this.

If you're open to edits, the $200k revenue/employee rule of thumb really doesn't make a lot of sense when you're comparing your three alternate business models (Hosted Rethink, DBaaS Rethink and "Hey, maybe PaaS on top of Rethink?").

Like you, I thought it would be way too hard to run a service (my own company was encouraged to do so, and we shied away for it for the same reason you stated). However, having seen it now from the inside for GCE for nearly 4 years, I can say it's much easier to "service-ize" yourself than it is to have built a product people want. And moreover, the shell scripts and operations stuff really scales (effectively, the hosted DB offering is the binary plus a bit of bash, while the other offerings require yet more "not done before" software).

Even more surprisingly, this statement:

> Managed hosting is essentially running the database for people on AWS so they don't have to. The alternative to using these services is setting up the database on AWS yourself. That's a pain, but it isn't actually that hard. So there is a very hard cap on how much managed database hosting services can charge.

turns out to just not be true in practice. People pay us (Cloud SQL) and AWS (RDS) a surprising amount of money to run MySQL in a VM for them. It turns out that people really like outsourcing even a small amount of pain, but that we're (as engineers) easily blindsided to "Um, why would I pay you XX% over the raw VM price? You're just running some shell scripts for me". Little things like automatically updating to the latest version, configuration replication, etc. are things that nobody will bat at an eye at paying you for (I believe in the DB space in particular, it's because the overall cost of your DB is dwarfed by "All the rest", so it's a good trade of people time versus $$s).

I hope this doesn't come across as Monday-morning quarterbacking, but if I did mine over again I'd take the "Build a great piece of software, and even if it's open, service-ize it for folks". It's true that you're competing with the Cloud providers, and that it seems like you wouldn't really be able to get people to pay you for it (and it's not your core competency), but I think it's the best option for this flavor of infrastructure software moving forward.

Why not position yourself as the better mongodb? You explained pretty well in the post mortem (and to yourself in 2014) how much better rethinkdb is to mongo. All you had to do was aggressively market yourself as the better option by directly comparing yourself to it.

I remember when iPhone first launched, the first 30 min was spent just trashing then-current smartphones - the blackberrys.

Nice write up! My outside personal perspective was that you needed to endure for longer. Things like Mongo rode the "Relational is a deadend, NoSQL to the rescue!" wave and gathered momentum before people started fully understanding the consequences of choosing Mongo. Now it seems there's a lot more caution being taken. Anecdotal accounts of people having success with things are taken with a grain of salt. People seem to be looking for more of a tidal wave of acceptance.

As an aside, lately it seems it's "OO is a deadend, Functional to the rescue!" ... so maybe you can leverage that wave instead... or deep learning... OverThinkDB maybe :)