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RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

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Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#81

Post by akg_67 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #69
skolsuper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mongodb-inc-announc... - Revenue: Total revenue was $150.8 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, an increase of 38% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $144.1 million, an increase of 39% year-over-year, and services revenue was $6.7 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year. - Gross Profit: Gross profit was $104.7 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, representin…

I'm always kind of amazed at the low services number on MongoDB earnings reports. It's 4-5%. This seems unusually low for enterprise database companies.

As percentage of total revenue, MongoDB service revenue is about half compared to what Oracle generates. My guess is customer churn is much higher for MongoDB.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#82

Post by leadingthenet »

gigatexal wrote: post #67

What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…

Eh, I think you’re way too quick to criticise him for it. He’s human, after all. And in love on top of it!

Personally, I appreciate the frankness. Too bad it got deleted.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#83

Post by SamReidHughes »

gigatexal wrote: post #67

What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…

Um, you're obviously lying in this post here, contradicting the source material you link to.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#84

Post by [deleted] »

nodesocket wrote: post #44
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, as the person who is ending up having to do the RethinkDB migration... it's the lack of an AWS hosted solution that killed it for us. Even the import is a great experience and moving to MongoDB wasn't too bad (after a bit of cleanup)

Interesting, RethinkDB was really easy to setup. Three EC2 instances (cluster), install their apt repo, and install. There were a few config options[1], but really minimal and clean. [1] https://rethinkdb.com/docs/config-file/

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#85

Post by 411111111111111 »

nodesocket wrote: post #44
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, as the person who is ending up having to do the RethinkDB migration... it's the lack of an AWS hosted solution that killed it for us. Even the import is a great experience and moving to MongoDB wasn't too bad (after a bit of cleanup)

Interesting, RethinkDB was really easy to setup. Three EC2 instances (cluster), install their apt repo, and install. There were a few config options[1], but really minimal and clean. [1] https://rethinkdb.com/docs/config-file/

The setup process isn't the reason people want to use hosted services, the maintenance is.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#86

Post by vosper »

alexashka wrote: post #20
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…

MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.

I’m on record here saying I really dislike Mongo DB and never want to work with it again. I stand by that. But Atlas is a really nice product (to work around the inherent failings of Mongo, but hey, you’re locked in already). Want to look at something in a backup? Select your snapshot, download and run a special binary, and point your client at it. It takes like 30 seconds to be pulling data from any backup. I did it this week. Now, would I have been able to make the mess I needed to recover from if I’d been using Postgres? No, of course not. But like I said: you’re locked-in already.

Edit: Mongo is a special kind of lock-in: your code ends up so much more tightly-coupled, and hard to extricate, because of the Mongo pattern of making you do the work to ensure consistency and correctness. I can’t imagine it was planned, but it’s highly effective: for many companies it’s just too much work, too expensive, and the benefits are too opaque (“but the application works now, and you’re telling me you want to switch databases and it’ll take how long?!”) for others to buy into.

I’d call it clever, but I think it’s a profitable accident that’s a braking force on the progress of many teams.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#87

Post by sky_rw »

akulkarni wrote: post #60
sky_rw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Sky. Sensobi days.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#88

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB

MongoDB is a weird one because what they had didn't even meet the most basic requirements of "a database", that you could store something in it and reliably get it back out. But they somehow converted their joke of a product into enough money to buy WiredTiger, rebrand its product as theirs, and profit. It's the ultimate expression of "fake it 'til you make it" and they did it by giving away stickers at conferences!

The best technology and product doesn't always win.

Once you realise what we do is not engineering, it's fashion, it will all make sense.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#89

Post by willvarfar »

Guthur wrote: post #51
alexashka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans have been humans for a lot longer than that!

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#90

Post by pjmlp »

maaarghk wrote: post #72
spolsky-wisdom wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an a…

On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".

And the return to timesharing systems.
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