On reasons why RethinkDB failed, add: not having SQL support.
RethinkDB Postmortem
141–150 of 270 posts
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#142I 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…
Go didn't "introduce" CSP or actor like primitives. Scala had actors in 2006, I think Clojure has for a similar amount of time as well. There have been libraries for it in Java and C++ also since the early 2000's and probably earlier.
Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far along the industry would be if you people would actually learn how to manage your memory and write C".
I don't see the industry gravitating towards bad re-implementations of C with less functionality and a flatter learning curve. The only "replacement" for C that I'm aware of is Rust, and Rust is most definitely not anti-intellectual in the same way I criticize Go.
Rust actually requires the developer to learn new concepts (borrow checker) which are not found in C, Python, Java, etc.
"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.
I didn't say to end experiments. I said everyone should actually learn some fundamentals before jumping on low-learning curve bandwagons which offer nothing new.
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#143Hello 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…
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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#144Hey 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.
While I feel for you because failure hurts so much, congratulations on learning from your experience. I know this won't make you feel any better, but the next time you try things will be so much easier.
By the way the tone is fine given your experience.
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#145Hey 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…
> (...) Since it's popular, it keeps being developed, and over time, it slowly gets more reliable.
Or people simply don't care/are not willing to pay for alternatives. MongoDB looks as unreliable as it was on the first day, but somehow people don't seem to care. I hope it's because their use-cases can live with the unreliability, but in fear it's because "won't happen to me, just to others".
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I've read the Economist for the last 20 years and the HBR for a few months before I dropped it. The Economist offers insight, thoughtful analysis and writes about the world: literally but also politics, culture, and science. The obituary is surprisingly fascinating for instance. You may not always agree with its position, but you know that their position will be worth engaging with and thinking about. No, I don't wor…
The best obituaries are in the Telegraph. I am still angry they have put them all behind a paywall :(
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intellectual is the wrong target, just as much as easy. Humans have a limited capacity to understand complex systems, and once they grow to a certan point, your ability to integrate and innovate on them is limited due to overhead of the layers of incedental complexity. Easy is just shoving complexity under the rug. Simplicity, and building systems meant for our meager human intelligences is better. I am not terribly…
The thing is, the modern systems are often less complex. SQL databases are generally far simpler than MongoDB - you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB. As for Java + async + threads, I use Akka and it's basically seamless. But Netty + core Java Executors is fine too, just more verbose.
> you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB.
No
SQL per se is not hard.
But the whole data modeling, creating tables, picking types is just needless bureaucracy
Yes, I want to save a json snippet and be done with it. I don't want to create another table because I have a 1-N relationship. And while ORMs make this easier it is still not painless
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kudos on a magnificent post, and of course commiserations. One thing resonated strongly with me. When we started out many years ago someone said to me that the worst market you could go after was to target developers. Case in point - every developer who's ever put up a web site has built or thought about building a CMS. There must be thousands upon thousands of them, virtually all with a price of $0. Who would want t…
IT people try and "trip you up" because we've been burnt so many times in the past with systems that don't do what is promised by the sales people, don't integrate well and who stiff you during the implementation phase. HR people are some of the worst because everything is super secret and they don't want to get IT involved, then they go and buy a system that lets you insert a carriage return into the phone number fi…
It hurts because I lived it so many times. The "you can't understand", "it's complicated", "it's a HR thing" is such bullshit.
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010, Compose by IBM in 2015 though.
Re: RethinkDB Postmortem
#150I 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…
firebase is also a realtime json database. I am quite satisfied with it till now