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RethinkDB Postmortem

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121–130 of 270 posts

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#121
post #119

> 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 prov…

Very nice to see people keep using and using RethinkDB for new products. We have one in productions. are also starting 2 more new products that is built upon rethink db. A Chatroom and an Realtime Geolocation /Map based app. Please join rethinkdb slack ! we are building back community,

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#122
I was working in a company where we built a new backend system and had the opportunity to chose the technologies we'd use. I was constantly looking at rethinkdb waiting for them to tell me "Yes, you can use this now," however their blog posts and announcements constantly had the underlying message of being in some kind of alpha or beta state.

Admittedly, that was a few years back, so that could have been true then, but the feeling stuck with me and I just stopped taking it seriously.

The problem is that they got a lot of attention early on and expectations were huge and instead of building some hype around it, they were actually too honest. In hindsight I, as an engineer, would have probably done the same, so I think there are some valuable lessons there about marketing and human psychology. At least that part the people at MongoDB did brilliantly.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#123

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. Compet…

compose is a startup. heroku was a startup when they started. in fact, if I have my timeline right then heroku managed postgres preceded RDS (http://www.zdnet.com/article/heroku-launches-cloud-postgres-... - 2011 versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Relational_Database_Ser... - 2013)

Rethinkdb is an incredible architecture. If I was in the market for something like rethinkdb/dynamodb, I would completely go with something that is built by the original inventors.

Just like docker for example.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#125
post #26
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 worked with people in the past that refused to touch postgres because it doesn't have a UI they like. They insisted on using MySQL for that sole reason.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#126
post #104

I am using RethinkDB in PartsBox ( https://partsbox.io/ ). I initially picked it because I wanted a JSON document database that has a correctly implemented distributed story. But later on it turned out that the realtime-push (changefeeds) functionality is actually fundamental for me. I used it to build an app where every open sessions gets instant updates. Right now I don't know what other database I could use, becau…

> Right now I don't know what other database I could use, because I found no other solution that supports this kind of functionality, especially in a distributed setting.

Have you looked at Datomic? It's not free but I think it provides the functionality you are looking for.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#127
post #65

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.

Thank you very much @atnnn for continued keeping RethinkDB alive.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#128
post #112

Hello HN , sorry for the early leak. I posted as I've discovered on github after looking around rethinkdb progress. RethinkDB as a product is not dead.The community and one of ex RethinkDB senior developer are still maintaining it. Since it is fully Opensourced , we are welcoming contributors , lets make RethinkDB great , together! https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb Here are current rehtinkdb plans : https://docs…

First of all: this is great, thank you so much!

Secondly, and with the risk of hijacking the OP: I think it would be a good thing if you could put a status update either on rethinkdb.com or ~the first paragraph of the readme on GitHub about what you are trying to accomplish related to the name/rights/ownership/license/... I check those about once a month to see if something has changed.

As a current user and someone evaluating future usage, this is causing the most uncertainty. I don't know how these things happen (it is probably complex). But I want to commit. Even if progress is slow. Bugfixes are important, but secondary if the project might somehow be significantly damaged trying to "escape" its current ownership.

As an example: you are trying to transfer ownership of the build tools? I understand that might take a while, but what if that somehow can't happen? Is recreating them realistic?

Basically a list of threats/risks would be nice to have! :)

EDIT: this is also relevant for contributors/donations/... any type of investment.

Thanks again!

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#129
post #45

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…

>>> People pay us (Cloud SQL) and AWS (RDS) a surprising amount of money to run MySQL in a VM for them.

As a happy RDS user, I totally agree. Surely, I could run MySQL and the result would be mostly fine, after some mistakes and lessons learned. But all the things such as upgrading, etc still take time, add a bit of stress, one more thing to care about. Could that time and energy be spent on more valuable (from business point of view) activities? Yes.

I have regretted this decision.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#130
post #128
post #112

Hello HN , sorry for the early leak. I posted as I've discovered on github after looking around rethinkdb progress. RethinkDB as a product is not dead.The community and one of ex RethinkDB senior developer are still maintaining it. Since it is fully Opensourced , we are welcoming contributors , lets make RethinkDB great , together! https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb Here are current rehtinkdb plans : https://docs…

First of all: this is great, thank you so much! Secondly, and with the risk of hijacking the OP: I think it would be a good thing if you could put a status update either on rethinkdb.com or ~the first paragraph of the readme on GitHub about what you are trying to accomplish related to the name/rights/ownership/license/... I check those about once a month to see if something has changed. As a current user and someone…

I am just one of RethinkDB community. i am waiting to contribute donations to RethhinkDB when it have foundation up and running.

I don't think Rethinkdb.com is under control of the Current Leadership Team . But it would be very good idea to put the status updates in ReadMe. I will submit a PR on it.

Development is still continuing , but slowly. It is close to release 2.4, @atnnn and @srh is working on it.

> Bugfixes are important, but secondary if the project might somehow be significantly damaged trying to "escape" its current ownership. > As an example: you are trying to transfer ownership of the build tools? I understand that might take a while, but what if that somehow can't happen? Is recreating them realistic?

@atnnn is building and running own build tool server and its almost perfect , he will need help there: https://github.com/AtnNn/rethinkdb-nix https://thanos.atnnn.com/jobset/rethinkdb/next#tabs-evaluati...

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