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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#161

Post by niftich »

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.…

It's not anti-intellectualism -- it's complete and utter lack of knowledge transfer, coupled with young people's spirit being dampened by established practices that are 50% reasonable, 50% bullshit.

This, piled on with subtle ageism, ensures that any useful lessons learned will only be learned by the time it's too late, and there's a new group of can-do people who feel stifled by the combined wisdom of the ages, so they break off and do their own thing.

I wrote about this here [1] with nicer language.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022926

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#162

Post by dkersten »

neoeldex wrote: post #133
v3ss0n wrote: 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…

Haven't tried recently, but the only way to install RethinkDB on my machine (ubuntu) was running the docker image. Is it currently fixed again?

That's strange. I've ran it on ubuntu (using the .deb, I believe) since 2014.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#163

Post by v3ss0n »

desireco42 wrote: post #67

I really can't read all this negativity. Seriously you guys need to snap out of it. You created something fantastic, a database that perfectly answers need of developers. Clearly you need to give it time and align your expectations with market. RethinkDB is fresh view on how databases can work and look, it provides level on goodness not seen before. Just continue building on it. Horizon is also awesome. Things don't…

The opensource effort is continuing although slowly , it have almost-daily commits. We need more users and contributors.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#164

Post by v3ss0n »

linuxhansl wrote: post #50

It's hard to sell something as low level as a database. For a startup there needs to be a specific itch to scratch, an itch that many potential customers experience frequently. As a systems-guy (more or less) I find that frustrating, but I have seen many times that this is so. It still worth having the courage to try and these guys did that. It could have worked. Hats off.

For us , its working very well and stable!

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#165

Post by dkersten »

antirez wrote: post #132

This was an excellent reading. No surprise given the author. I think there is a missing element about this in the post: > Correctness. We made very strict guarantees, and fulfilled them religiously. It is true that the user base did not recognize this as important as the RethinkDB team, also because there is part of the development community which is very biased towards this aspect of correctness, at the point that y…

For me, this was very important and I think I was very much aligned with the teams goals, which is probably why I like RethinkDB so much. The problem is, I wasn't (and still am not) in a position where I could have paid a bunch of money for it. A little, maybe, but not enough to make a real dent.

So I suspect that the people who cared about the same things that the team did are also the people who 1) either aren't the ones making the final business decision or 2) aren't in a position where they could or would pay much for it.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#166

Post by dkersten »

raverbashing wrote: post #140
antirez wrote: post #132

This was an excellent reading. No surprise given the author. I think there is a missing element about this in the post: > Correctness. We made very strict guarantees, and fulfilled them religiously. It is true that the user base did not recognize this as important as the RethinkDB team, also because there is part of the development community which is very biased towards this aspect of correctness, at the point that y…

I'd say that for more than 90% of potential RethinkDB users there's no need for guaranteed correctness (several exception are in FinTech or similar areas) But even in those cases, the operation can be retried or the operation could take longer If you're "Social startup of the year" it doesn't matter if one post appear to some followers 100ms later than they should be.

If you're "Social startup of the year" it doesn't matter if one post appear to some followers 100ms later than they should be.

That's latency, not correctness. I think even "social startup of the year" cares that the post shows up at all, is attributed to the correct author, isn't corrupted somewhere and so on. Data correctness/consistency is about making sure that the data isn't in an inconsistent state.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#167

Post by cyberferret »

dvcrn wrote: post #125
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 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.

+1. The main reason I didn't jump on to Postgress decades ago was because the tooling was really bad. Third party tools for MySQL were streets ahead, even back then.

End result is that I jumped on the MySQL bandwagon, and even all the negative posts against it now and the lauding of Postgres in here all the time cannot make me change tracks. I just have too much data and IP invested in it now.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#168

Post by dkersten »

jhchen wrote: post #89
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.

RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this

I believe the storage backend remained largely the same (ie current RethinkDB, IIRC, is still optimised for SSD). Maybe I'm mistaken.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#169

Post by v3ss0n »

zigzigzag wrote: post #160
niftich wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it cross-platform (Win32, Windows UWP, OS X, multiple linuxes, iOS, Android) and most of that same code works on the web? It's okay to bemoan Electron for being bloated but multiple balls have been dropped by OS and platform makers, GUI toolkit makers, language runtime makers, and that giant amount of missing glue inbetween, to get to where we are. It's rather sad that Electron, out of all things, is the first…

Electron certainly isn't the first thing to give "write once, run anywhere", let alone good enough to satisfy users. I groan every time I download an app only to discover it's Electron based. Java beat Electron to write-once-run-anywhere by a couple of decades, and still does in the sense that Electron requires you to make platform-specific builds of your app even if the core code is the same (Java gives you that opt…

> Java beat Electron to write-once-run-anywhere No , not on web.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#170

Post by antman »

Good ideas but as an outsider that wanted to use it this was my takeout:

If I look at google trends [0] mongodb starts trending July 2009 (It exists earlier but it is the time that rises) rethinkdb equivalent is March 2015 and it never rises so steeply. That is six years.

With all the people I've talked nobody new rethinkdb it and it was not a problem of re-educating them on its merits. So what was needed was marketing, success stories and competitors' failure stories.

People did not know it existed. Maybe in the cognitively saturated NoSQL market we more. Gone are the days we could predict developers' needs on our hunches or our interpretations of the feedback we are given from early adopters because they are a biased sample.

Worse: we might need people in marketing and, god forbid, some MBAs.

[0]: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rethinkdb,m...

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