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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#61

Post by vosper »

boulos wrote: post #45
coffeemug wrote: post #32

Hey all, author here. FYI, the post is still in its unpublished state. It's basically right, but I've been meaning to edit it for tone and rewrite the market failure section for clarity. Didn't get the chance to do that before it made it on HN, so keep in mind that you're reading a (late) draft.

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…

To back you up on this, at the last place I worked we ran our own MySQL master and slaves for years, with moving to RDS always on the back burner. Finally completing that migration and shutting down our own servers was a big achievement. Never looked back, and were happy to be paying AWS to take care of the DBs for us.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#62

Post by flukus »

manigandham wrote: post #35
hoodoof wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean pG isn't designed for scalability? Its SMP scaling is incredibly good, close to linear.

Postgres neither scales vertically or horizontally. v9.6 finally brought some parallel scans but is still limited in scope and far behind the commercial databases. Same with replication and failover, although there are decent 3rd party extensions to get it working.

The vast majority of us probably won't ever need that scalability anyway. Most places I've seen that needed something more scalable needed to just stop being so retarded with the tools they already had.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#63

Post by williamstein »

rogerbinns wrote: post #17
bcantrill wrote: post #10

Fascinating read, albeit a sad one: I love RethinkDB, and use it personally every day in our particular production deployment.[1] But -- and to Slava's point -- we didn't/don't/wouldn't pay for it, and in that regard, we were part of the problem. That said, the constraint on that particular problem was that it had to be open source, and if it couldn't have been RethinkDB, it would have been some other open source dat…

> ... the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software ... MongoDB server is AGPL - client drivers are Apache. To be fair the business side is based around larger scale deployment and management, and is proprietary add-ons. I'm kind of surprised that approach wasn't mentioned for Rethinkdb - a free open core product, with paid extras dealing with pain points in larger deploymen…

It is possible to buy a different non-AGPL license to MongoDB -- https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing. With RethinkDB it seems completely impossible to do so. I begged and pleaded: http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicens.... I just spent most of my time during the last two months rewriting SageMathCloud to use PostgreSQL instead of RethinkDB, with the catalyst for doing this being the AGPL licensing and some concrete enterprise customers needing a completely non-GPL'd stack for SageMathCloud. Coming out of this rewrite, and back to PostgreSQL (which I've used off and on for decades), I'm very impressed by PostgreSQL today, and the LISTEN/NOTIFY functionality is a solid building block on which to build something like changefeeds (thanks to the many HN comments on previous stories about RethinkDB for pointing this out!).

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#64

Post by gabesullice »

sikan wrote: post #47

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.

I think he did mention this indirectly. Mongo performs better than Rethink on metrics that have nothing to do with what you truly want from a DB. He mentioned developers that would just whip up a script to throw thousands of writes at the database but never reads. Use cases that they would never see in real scenarios. First, you would need to educate your market that they need to care about the CAP theorem and what that is, that Rethink was damn good CP and that while Mongo might be fast, it isn't correct.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#65

Post by atnnn »

Some of us are keeping the RethinkDB database and community alive. The code is open source, and development continues slowly. The next release is almost ready. It'll have new features and performance improvements.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#66

Post by williamstein »

vii wrote: post #30

Slava (coffeemug) is very brave to introspect publicly and whenever I interacted with him, behaved with greatest integrity and kindness. Unfortunately, his hypothesis here that devtools are a tough market does not ring true. Making a business is always tough, making one that does something new is even tougher. There are many tools and database companies doing extraordinarily well, from Atlassian to Cloudera to Docker…

I spent 1.5 years writing a ton of code using RethinkDB, and the last two months rewriting all the code (and more) using PostgreSQL. You are completely right, e.g., "For RethinkDB, it was wrong to try to force people to learn a new language to use a DB, when there are just tons of interfaces already, and the new language has incremental benefits over say SQL." rings very true. SQL is incredibly expressive and the tooling around it is very mature.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#67

Post by desireco42 »

I really can't read all this negativity. Seriously you guys need to snap out of it. You created something fantastic, a database that perfectly answers need of developers. Clearly you need to give it time and align your expectations with market.

RethinkDB is fresh view on how databases can work and look, it provides level on goodness not seen before. Just continue building on it. Horizon is also awesome. Things don't happen overnight.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#68

Post by lelandbatey »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond "low learning curve". It's my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great. Think about some examples. MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded.…

I'm going to fundamentally disagree with at least the target of Go. Go introduced a series of concurrency primitives with syntax that's made writing and reasoning about concurrent code a joy, something that's not the case in Java/C++/C/Python (maybe up till the late 3.X in the case of Python), and it did that with a language paradigm (interface driven) that's vastly different from Python's mixture of OOP and duck-typing.

And sorry, but "I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres."?

Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far along the industry would be if you people would actually learn how to manage your memory and write C".

Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far the industry would have progressed if we let go of the harmful and outdated concept of imperative programming and embraced functional paradigms."

... and on it goes.

-----------------

Additionally, you say "I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry" only to end your post with "why can't we abandon all our experimenting and learning and just stick to good old Java which obviously would solve all our problems", which is itself MASSIVELY anti-intellectual.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#69

Post by flukus »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond "low learning curve". It's my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great. Think about some examples. MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded.…

Don't forget the proliferation of electron so no one has to learn a new language and desktop toolsets.

Just for kicks I wrote a desktop todo list in GTK and C, not tools I had extensive knowledge of ever and nothing recently. It was a breath of fresh air how simple it was compared to doing the same in modern frameworks. A single ~30 line function to create the gui and the rest held together with a couple of function pointers. It was faster (to write and run) and simpler than anything I'd written in years. More responsive than the most responsive web framework too.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#70

Post by kazagistar »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond "low learning curve". It's my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great. Think about some examples. MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded.…

Intellectual is the wrong target, just as much as easy. Humans have a limited capacity to understand complex systems, and once they grow to a certan point, your ability to integrate and innovate on them is limited due to overhead of the layers of incedental complexity. Easy is just shoving complexity under the rug. Simplicity, and building systems meant for our meager human intelligences is better.

I am not terribly fond of Go, but it has a decent answer in auto-implemented interfaces and duck typing. It's not about dumbing down, it's just different, and easier on the compiler, which is a significant advantage.

And as for async in java... ugh, how awful. We finally got something like promises and lambdas, but most APIs are still trapped in synchronous calls and using the JPA is a disaster of hidden thread-local state. What kind of stack are you using to make java async work? Maybe I'm just missing something.

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