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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#71

Post by flukus »

lelandbatey wrote: post #68
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-typ…

> "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.

That's a mis-characterization. There is a difference between experimenting and learning and pushing all sorts of questionable fashion trends into production.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#72

Post by huckyaus »

desireco42 wrote: post #67

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…

> Just continue building on it.

You say this as though they weren't fresh out of money, energy and competitive advantage.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#73

Post by lelandbatey »

flukus wrote: post #71
lelandbatey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-typ…

> "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. That's a mis-characterization. There is a difference between experimenting and learning and pushing all sorts of questionable fashion trends into production.

While true, the "pushing" being done is a very small compared to only the "development" of said technologies. The exact words of the parent where:

> I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres.

And that is preceded by what I can only described as a bunch of undue mischaracterization of several languages and technologies, all of which definitely seems to imply that "yeah, all that other stuff is just a bunch of fads, why don't we stick to the real deal and all write Java."

Now, I don't want to be unkind to Java here. It's true that Java is an incredibly powerful language and there are a wide variety of technologies and tools that are absolutely incredible that you can only get via the Java ecosystem. But that can be said of many languages, e.g. C++/C.

I think what the GP may have meant, and which I do agree with, is that our industry would progress if we as developers spent a bit more time learning about the context and history of current and past solutions. We'd probably re-invent the wheel a bit less often.

But I don't want to limit that recommendation to "learn Java Postgres". I think Java developers might benefit from examining the benefits of a language like Haskell, Python programmers may benefit from a language with strong typing, such as C++/Rust/Go, that Unix lovers might learn a lot from examining the Windows NT kernel API's, and so on. If we examine the things that aren't close to us, the things with which we're the least familiar, that's when I believe the most fruitful learning can occur.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#74

Post by mifeng »

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.

As a former startup founder, I totally empathize - it's always clearer with hindsight but it's important to honestly reflect so you can apply the lessons learned to the next turn of the ferris wheel.

> We set out to build a good database system, but users wanted a good way to do X.

If you replace "database system" with "[any product]," it encapsulates the reason why many startups fail. I was guilty of it too. I think it's a common pitfall for technical founders who tend to think in terms of solutions rather than problems.

If you have some free time, I would recommend the book What Customers Want by Anthony Ulwick, which offers a systematic approach to formulating a product that satisfies a market's underserved needs.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#75

Post by joshberkus »

Coffeemug: there's one other thing you missed in the postmortem. The early marketing (1st year) for RethinkDB was all about optimizing for SSD storage. Since this was largely nonsense, database consultants like me (who were in a position to push technically correct solutions) read about it, and dismissed RethinkDB from our thoughts forever. I keep up pretty well with the OSS DB field, and didn't realize what you were really trying to build until five years later. With the number of NoSQL and NewSQL DBs entering the market in 2007-2010, I simply didn't have time to re-evaluate any of them.

So that's an other "take-home" from the post-mortem: be careful about your "first impression" on the market, because it can be really hard to change.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#76

Post by mikekchar »

rspeer wrote: post #59
ubercore wrote: post #46

Man, I would have loved to pay for RethinkDB. Granted, the blame lies on me here, but something I was disappointed to see the first point not acknowledge that RethinkDB didn't really ask for money. I mean, I don't know if they changed it after folding, but go the site and tell me how to pay for it. I would have paid a licensing fee to continue using it, but we've taken the time to switch over to Postgres now. EDIT: A…

On the other hand, I understand why most developers wouldn't pay "even the price of a Starbucks coffee" for the product: because paying anything as a developer is hard. It requires making the case for why you need it to other people in the company. Developers aren't usually in a position to make financial decisions on a whim, especially those where the cost will probably grow in the future.

I think this is right on the money. As a vendor, you have to understand who your users are and who your customers are. In this space, they are different. Just look at the number of developer tools that are "free for non-commercial use". Developers don't pay for tools. Companies pay for tools that they are convinced they can't get any other way.

They didn't have a poor market; they didn't have any market at all. If I'm the CTO of XYZ, explain to me what I'm buying. I hate to keep coming back to it, but that's what Cygnus did so brilliantly: "You need an embedded development system. The existing solutions do nearly what you want. Pay us slightly less, and we will make GCC do exactly what you want." I know what I'm paying for.

"Build it and they will come" does not work in the open source space -- because if you have already built it, they don't need to pay you. And if you haven't, then they don't want it.

Now, if they had built a DB similar to Mongo and then sold a service that migrated people off of failing Mongo installations and onto RethinkDB, then they would be on to something. Tired of having your DB chew your data for breakfast? Want to have your reports finished the same day you ran them? For the price of a single developer, we will fix all your problems by migrating you to RethinkDB. That's something that will make money.

But who wants to charge for services? How will we get our multiples if we only charge once for our work? That's just folly!

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#77

Post by alexandercrohde »

As somebody squarely in your target audience (sr software engineer with major respect for databases done correctly and no respect for anything like mongo) let me give my perspective.

A) I have no idea what makes rethink db better than mysql off the top of my head (maybe stuff exists, but I don't know what it is. I also am risk-averse and don't really have any major complaints with mysql).

B) I understand there are a lot of database technologies out there (mysql is always improving, people speak highly of postgres, people keep mentioning this maria DB thing, etc) which leads to a decision fatigue. It's much in the same way that if I have to choose between learning 3 frameworks, I'll just use none and see which one dies first because I'm optimizing for not learning dying technologies.

So unfortunately it comes down to marketing, which is a disappoint to anybody who wants to believe the best products will market themselves and win out. Sorry betamax.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#78

Post by l1ambda »

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 just want to nitpick about Node a little bit--as a Java developer and Postgres user myself--because there is more to Node than just async JavaScript and I think it gets a bad rap a little bit because of that. Async is one good quality of Node, but it also has this really great debugging integration with Chrome DevTools. And even really huge Node programs start fast--usually in less than a second--so you get this really tight development feedback loop. So you have this overall pleasant experience of a great module system where mostly everything out there is already going to be async (less likely in Java), a REPL, a fantastic debugger and profiler via the Chrome DevTools, and extremely quick process restarts. I think for some people these qualities outweigh the lack of static typing and JavaScript language quirks (which a lot have been ironed out in ES6 and ES7 anyway).

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#79

Post by manigandham »

slake wrote: post #26
StavrosK wrote: post #5

I don't know, my personal opinion was that RethinkDB had its head on straight, MongoDB is garbage and still neither is so much better than PostgreSQL that I will switch away from it. Postgres is the default datastore (because schemas are awesome) for me, and I haven't had a use case yet where I needed something that Postgres wouldn't do. Maybe if you have a very specific need, you'd reach for another datastore (come…

I agree Postgres is pretty awesome, but I think the one thing it has going against it is a good GUI client. MySQL has way too many good options wherease Postgres is stuck on this front.

Highly recommend DBeaver http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#80

Post by adictator »

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.

Thank you for the detailed analysis & post. I am myself embarking on a startup journey, albeit in the world of consulting & I wanted to let you know that your in depth writeup was extremely valuable & in many ways poignant to me. There were so many learnings in there and the way your bared it all, it feels it must have been excruciatingly hard to let go of your company (& co-workers) in the end. Thanks again & I wish you all the very best for your next venture - wiser & better.
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