RethinkDB Postmortem

Nice reading and Kudos to the entire RethinkDB team for what they have done, especially the evangelization of the Reactive Model in the database. This inspired other vendors like OrientDB to do the same.

Running a company where a large part of the users is developers is very hard. The secret sauce is providing a good product and create a business where some of the users would pay to have something more, like support and/or an Enterprise edition.

The truth is, AFAIK, no NoSQL company backed by VC is still profitable today. Not even MongoDB that has got more than $300M and is able to collect just $60M/year by spending much more to be up & running.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of OrientDB.

> "how is RethinkDB different from MongoDB?" We worked hard to explain why correctness, simplicity, and consistency are important, but ultimately these weren't the metrics of goodness that mattered to most users.

So everybody is crying how shitty and unreliable MongoDB is, but this is exactly what makes them successful? Very interesting!

Just downloaded it and it seems effective and well-polished. Thanks for the recommendation, mySQL Workbench has some killer bugs that made me stop using it.

As someone who has worked at a bootstrapped B2B FLOSS company in the ERP/database domain I think taking/relying on venture capital is a dangerous model in that domain. I feel like the best options are:

1) Don't build a company around your FLOSS project, accept it'll be free in all senses forever

2) Start with a customer that will finance you and build slowly (focus on profit not revenue)

That's obviously not very helpful as finding that one customer is the really hard part so it's usually a hybrid of expecting what you build to be free forever and then finding that one customer. Quote/Charge a lot. Nope more than that. Now double the price and you're roughly there.

On the plus side you'll get very enthusiastic developers that tend to be intrinsically motivated which is a huge plus once you can build that company. I'd argue that this is one of the key competitive advantages of a "FLOSS company"

When it comes to new customers...Always be aware that you're not selling your cool tech but rather selling the solution to a specific problem (basically you're selling pain-easing medicine). I feel like it is beneficial to visualize a somewhat mean guy at the other end of the table who is only thinking this one line over and over "enough with the nerd speak, how does it help me and does it roughly cost what I expect it to cost". Yes we like to imagine that we can impress people with nifty tech details and shudder that the competition might be "that horrible Oracle database every developer hates". Hand in hand with this...charge a lot. The price serves as a signal. Just assume that evil guy you're talking to only cares about getting back to that golf course and won't even look at the number that closely as long as it's fitting his expectation. Yes that means charging too little can kill your deal.

    > People wanted RethinkDB to be fast on workloads they actually tried, rather than "real world" workloads we suggested.

    > For example, they'd write quick scripts to measure how long it takes to insert ten thousand documents without ever reading them back.

    > MongoDB mastered these workloads brilliantly, while we fought the losing battle of educating the market.

I was one of the people who did this and I'd like to provide you another take away:

Don't tell people what "real world" workloads are. They know better than you do. When I presented my performance testing scripts to you guys it was a replication of our real world workload. Trying to explain to someone that their workload isn't "real world" hurts the confidence in the system. Its better to either say that isn't a workload you are optimized for or that you are working on it.

That being said, I'm now building a start-up and using RethinkDB because it is the best system out there! My performance requirements for a start-up are significantly different than the billion dollar survey company I used to work for ;) But I'd also like to commend you on the performance you've achieved with RethinkDB in general, it has come a long way and any company would be happy to hit the scale that RethinkDB has issues with!