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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#81

Post by fooey »

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.

I've tried really hard to like Postgres, but coming from SQL Server land, the tooling is mind blowingly atrocious. Every few months I go on a google spree trying to find the magic tool to make it less painful, but everything is either just as awful as pgadmin or costs way too much.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#82

Post by lobster_johnson »

hoodoof wrote: post #11

Interesting perspective. The article talks alot about big companies that make lots of money but as a user of databases I always saw the competition to ReThink DB being Postgres, MySQL and to a lesser extent ArangoDB and MongoDB. The core problem for Rethink being that, well, I can get as much database as I want for free. I explored many/most of the new/nosql databases and in the end always found that Postgres was the…

Exactly this. RethinkDB's value proposition wasn't really that attractive compared to Postgres.

Replication and a nice UI, sure, those are nice. But Postgres has fantastic single-host performance, and Rethink is not yet in a position to compete there, except in some horizontally scaled use cases. Rethink doesn't even have transactions, making it potentially useless for some things that require strict atomicity over a complicated data model. In general, Postgres has such a richness of features that it's hard to compete with it; PostGIS alone is a "killer app" if you do any kind of GIS stuff.

For me, there weren't any such "killer app" features. The change streaming is nice, but it's not difficult to do that with Postgres either. That's it really: Every solution offered by Rethink could be countered with "that's nice, but trivial with Postgres".

The one exception being horizontal replication. I have yet to launch a project where Postgres couldn't scale out well enough, and I suspect that if I got to that point, I would reach for bigger/different guns such as Cassandra. For our apps we typically use Elasticsearch in front as a kind of read-only mirror of Postgres; the latter being the slow, serializable path, and the former the fast, slightly-out-of-sync path. Users don't know the difference.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#83

Post by jpalomaki »

sandGorgon wrote: post #57

Hosted db is the way to go. Just as a perspective - this is 2017. How many multi-AZ, failover tolerant, hosted postgresql offerings do you know of? RDS, Heroku and Compose. Google and Azure still dont do hosted postgres. So many people pay for Dynamodb. You could be an alternative. The point is - rethinkdb still exists. you could still do it. via preorders on Kickstarter.

It's much lower barrier to buy managed database service from Amazon or Microsoft than from a start-up.

They have the credibility. You don't question if these companies really have the people to keep the stuff running. In many cases the customers also already have a billing relationship with them. Much less friction to just add one new service to the already quite big invoice vs buying from a different company.

Competing with AWS or Google is hard, they would be still making money on the infra even if they gave the managed database out for free.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#84

Post by sroussey »

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.

The key to building developer tools is to build the ones that a developer needs but has no interest in creating. Backend for mobile, infrastructure for backend, etc.

Just don't create front end tools for front end developers, for example. Firebug had a donate button and we funneled all of it to volunteers in places where the currency was weak to make it at least seem material.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#85

Post by justintocci »

fooey wrote: post #81
slake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've tried really hard to like Postgres, but coming from SQL Server land, the tooling is mind blowingly atrocious. Every few months I go on a google spree trying to find the magic tool to make it less painful, but everything is either just as awful as pgadmin or costs way too much.

We'd would love to have your help on Postage. We want to be the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio of PostgreSQL. Just file issues at Github for bugs and features, we'll do our best to keep up.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#86

Post by flukus »

lelandbatey wrote: post #73
flukus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

I took the GP in a very figurative way as well. A lot of the learning being done at the moment though is simply framework churn, there are developers out their familiar with a million web and client side frameworks that would have been much better served learning SQL. Our apps would be better if we focused more and learning about usability and our users than on CSS compilers. As an industry I think we're under serving everyone right now, people have machines a thousand times more powerful than a couple of decades ago but what they can do with them is almost identical.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#87

Post by jamiecurle »

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.

Postico is very nice. I've been using it (and it's predecessor - PG Commander) for a few years. Worth the money I paid for it.

https://eggerapps.at/postico/

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#88

Post by travisoliphant »

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.

Kudos on the post and for sharing. I really enjoyed reading the candor and hearing from your experiences. I heard amazing things about RethinkDB and admire your team for what you did.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#89

Post by jhchen »

joshberkus wrote: post #75

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…

Why is optimizing for SSDs nonsense? Empirically this seems correct since RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this but curious about the technical explanation.
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