Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

defmacro.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 237 posts

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#51

Post by Guthur »

alexashka wrote: post #36
runawaybottle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know at some point in the last 20ish years, people really got used to the idea of free music. Once people get used to the idea of ‘free’, it’s like, good luck arguing against that. I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.

Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default? You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

What sort of nonsense are you talking about, monetary systems have existed for 1000s of years.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#52

Post by Aeolun »

nodesocket wrote: post #25
plorkyeran wrote: post #13

With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo... ), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we…

I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…

Performance for my workload (writes/reads for a relatively small number of large documents) was absolutely atrocious.

To the point that retrieving data based on a secondary index (of like 10000 documents) took like 5s.

Then inserting the same documents took a significant (don’t remember the exact magnitude) amount of time as well.

By comparison mysql does the same stuff in 50ms (or less).

Everything around RethinkDB was fantastic, but I just couldn’t justify that since the basic operation was so terrible.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#53

Post by itisit »

akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

I learned this at a young age: "The reporter follows the actor." Which are you?

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#54

Post by Aeolun »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #39
Godel_unicode wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.

Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's not impossible to succeed in developer tools; it's just a lot harder than other markets. And you usually also need an accidental luck factor like being the perfect product at the perfect time.

More like all dev tools that I can buy as an individual are easy to pay for.

Things like a database would have to go through procurement if I wanted to use them and they weren’t free, and I avoid procurement like the plague.

Why the hell wants to spend their time justifying why something is the best solution to people that don’t have a clue.

I’d only go through that if the difference in quality was so palpable that I basically had no choice.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#55

Post by Aeolun »

runawaybottle wrote: post #19
wideareanetwork wrote: post #8

I thought they failed cause unbelievably powerful databases are available totally free. What more reason is needed?

Mongodb has a 15b market cap, and mongo is widely derided.

But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#56

Post by lmeyerov »

billconan wrote: post #4

is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad? developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.

The DB sector is great. As long as you have something differentiating, like a type of query that some businesses need, the growing market size and rise of DBaaS makes it super attractive because of conversion and stickiness.

However... who you sell to isn't the people giving you GitHub stars and retweets, and they will have diff needs. if you lose sight of that....

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#57

Post by senderista »

runawaybottle wrote: post #19
wideareanetwork wrote: post #8

I thought they failed cause unbelievably powerful databases are available totally free. What more reason is needed?

Mongodb has a 15b market cap, and mongo is widely derided.

They finally got their engineering act together (via the Sleepycat acquisition), long after they'd made it big.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#58

Post by akulkarni »

mraza007 wrote: post #41
akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

This is my favorite comment and I totally agree with you and more you talk to different people the more you discover and that discovery leads to some of the best ideas. Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product

  Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product
This is tricky - there is no one right answer. I would start by building something that you need ("scratch your own itch" as some people say). It's much easier to build the right thing when you need that thing.

But also good to "sanity check" your instincts by checking in with people whom you respect and whom you think will understand the market better than you (which is what my parent comment is trying to get at).

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#59

Post by senderista »

Aeolun wrote: post #52
nodesocket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…

Performance for my workload (writes/reads for a relatively small number of large documents) was absolutely atrocious. To the point that retrieving data based on a secondary index (of like 10000 documents) took like 5s. Then inserting the same documents took a significant (don’t remember the exact magnitude) amount of time as well. By comparison mysql does the same stuff in 50ms (or less). Everything around RethinkDB…

But, but...the data structures were all lock-free! Who cares if throughput sucked?

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#60

Post by akulkarni »

sky_rw wrote: post #49
akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

I learned this bit of insight from you directly several years ago and reflect on it often. The first thing you did when we sat down was start grilling me on my views of tech trends and emerging areas of innovation. I was caught a bit off guard and gave terrible answers, but adopting that attitude of curiosity has helped me tremendously to find my market and grow my business.

Nice! I agree that curiosity is an incredibly valuable trait, especially in an entrepreneur.

(In fact, one of our company values at TimescaleDB is, "Be a student in both work and life".)

BTW - who is this? My apologies, I don't recognize the username :-)

Post reply on HN