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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#91

Post by agibsonccc »

hkailahi wrote: post #2

I'm surprised there are no comments here, this is the best thing I've seen on HN in a while.

I'll attempt to add to this. I might be stating things that are a bit controversial here.

1 thing we are always transparent with users about is how our business model works. 1 of my favorite videos on the internet about this is [1]. We are very much based on closed source for making revenue. This has actually helped with our community a lot.

We are basically focused on closed source solutions for specific verticals. The only way to get clients to pay is to make something more efficient or don't open source/core it. For open source companies there is always a trade off of community vs customers. You have to find a hard line and stick to it.

Community is great, but most of those people won't want to pay you. You can try to convert them, but that takes a lot of time and isn't the best path to market. We strive to provide a great base line experience to our users, but a few of the things we have found in practice that helps:

1. Features have customer names on them

2. There's a mass of community interest in a specific feature

You have to be careful about where time is spent. It's very easy to mistake "users" for "customers".

I wish slava and co the best of luck and really appreciate their post mortem. 1 thing we've learned as an infra company is "be as close to the app as possible". In our case the bulk of what we focus on is banking/telco anomaly detection.

It's a straight forward revenue making product that can benefit from deep learning. The great thing is we can grow in to other use cases later on if we find something else interesting to work on.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#92

Post by lacker »

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 FYI, the post is still in its unpublished state.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.

This was a really interesting post. Thanks for writing it.

First with MySQL and then with MongoDB, a pattern is emerging. There's a popular open-source database. Its feature set is awesome and the ecosystem of software on top of it is good because lots of people are using it, but it's buggy and unreliable. So it's controversial. Since it's popular, it keeps being developed, and over time, it slowly gets more reliable.

To me this post is a reminder that, just because I can see clear flaws with a competing product, it doesn't mean those flaws are exploitable. Better to focus on what your own customers are demanding than on criticisms of your competitor.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#93

Post by flukus »

agibsonccc wrote: post #91
hkailahi wrote: post #2

I'm surprised there are no comments here, this is the best thing I've seen on HN in a while.

I'll attempt to add to this. I might be stating things that are a bit controversial here. 1 thing we are always transparent with users about is how our business model works. 1 of my favorite videos on the internet about this is [1]. We are very much based on closed source for making revenue. This has actually helped with our community a lot. We are basically focused on closed source solutions for specific verticals.…

> 1. Features have customer names on them

Even seen this backfire at many commercial companies. Adding whatever features a company is willing to pay for will often pull a product in multiple, incompatible directions.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#94

Post by runeks »

Perceptes wrote: post #9

I really appreciate the deep introspection in this post. We can all learn a lot from it. I'm one of the (possible minority) of HN users that doesn't care about startups and business, so for me the takeaway was about how choosing quality and correctness over speed works out in the real world. It seems that you really can't take the idealist approach to quality that RethinkDB took. The world just isn't willing to wait,…

> The world just isn't willing to wait, and it's not willing to take the time to understand a system and to see how clearly it distinguishes itself from the alternatives.

This world is always willing to wait, it was the RethinkDB team and/or their investors who weren't. The world will wait for you in eternity; it's just not willing to provide you with capital during the wait.

Your statement makes sense if there were a dozen competitors in the database space. With hundreds of competitors, actually evaluating them all becomes more expensive than just choosing eg. a managed SQL solution and then switching provider if it doesn't live up to its promises.

That's so much more flexible from a business perspective than evaluating a hundred different open source database systems, settling on one, and then having to rewrite your database code when the database you've chosen ceases development, and you're left as the maintainer of it.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#95

Post by atmosx »

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.

Thanks for the post. One can feel your pain flowing through it.

I have a rather naive question: Why do you recommend "the Economist" as oppose to something like the HBR?

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#96

Post by ianamartin »

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.

Microsoft gets a lot of shit for various and mostly good reasons. But their tooling is seriously top notch. I would murder kittens to get tools like SSMS for postgres.

Hell Python Tools for Visual Studio almost makes me want to do python dev work on a PC.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#97

Post by elcritch »

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…

A hosted distributed SQL-ish database running on Joyent would be amazing! I checked the available packages on Joyent cloud many times not quite believing RethinkDB _wasn't_ on the list as it seemed such a great fit. Fast native containers with RethinkDB's shardibg support would have been fun to have "precanned" support for.

Currently the pre-packaged databases on Joyent don't support both clustering and consistency. Is there anything in the works for this segment?!

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#98

Post by davyjones »

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 developed and use(d) pgxplorer (github.com/pgxplorer). So, I can tell you this: the best out there is psql (CLI). There exists no use case where a GUI is better than psql.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#99

Post by smhg »

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.…

> Isomorphism simply didn't work.

Care to elaborate? I'd really like to know your opinion as this is an important aspect of my developer-life.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#100

Post by sikan »

gabesullice wrote: post #64
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 t…

Why not call them out then? It should take only one or two blog articles to explain why mongodb benchmarks are bogus. I fail to believe it is hard to teach some database knowledge (CAP and others) to your potential customer when they are developers. Heck, it would even boost your SEO by a ton.
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