RethinkDB: why we failed (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#191

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

mamcx wrote: post #152

jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

This the key. I'm also a dreamer of a better RDBMs ( https://tablam.org ) and wish I could live doing it... but working on the sector of small business what they want is a better access/excel. Probably that is what bigger companies want too. So the internal tech is just a mean to make that possible. I think if a db engine provide the equivalent of the auto-admin of Django it will sell itself easily :) However this is…

There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that until you have compelling products demonstrating how your “better” RDBMS contributes to better business solutions, there's not something the technical people who understand the theoretical advantages can take to the less technical people that need to approve the decision to justify it over established RDBMSs, that are not only seen as more secure from a business perspective but also easier to hire qualified admins, etc., for.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#192

Post by mamcx » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #191

mamcx wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This the key. I'm also a dreamer of a better RDBMs ( https://tablam.org ) and wish I could live doing it... but working on the sector of small business what they want is a better access/excel. Probably that is what bigger companies want too. So the internal tech is just a mean to make that possible. I think if a db engine provide the equivalent of the auto-admin of Django it will sell itself easily :) However this is…

There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that until you have compelling products demonstrating how your “better” RDBMS contributes to better business solutions, there's not something the technical people who understand the theoretical advantages can take to the less technical people that need to approve the decision to justify it over established RDBMSs, that are not only seen as more secure from a business pers…

Yeah, is like build a OS or in fact any infrastructure project. The key is have a clear north so the project know what need to nail at first try...

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#193

Post by simonebrunozzi » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

toolslive wrote: post #74

I distinctly remember their creative hiring tactics: They anonymously floated mysterious puzzles across the web. The solution was a domain name which had a static website yielding an email address. If you sent a email to that address they immediately asked you if you were interested in working for them. I know, because I solved one (The lure to solve the mystery was just too tempting to resist)

Did you also end up working there? Or just solved the puzzle, got the offer but refused?

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#194

Post by nix23 » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #173

As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interac…

DON'T switch if it works! A working system has nothing todo with "favor" or "momentum".

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#195

Post by cubicmeter » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

You can compare selling a database to selling git. Nobody is selling git itself, they sell the hosting around the tech, or create a dev workflow (gitlab) that uses git at its core.

If anyone tried to sell git itself it would be impossible. I never used mongodb for reasons listed in the article. But there is free and open source and resilient postgres.

the companies who succeeded around git did not build git. it would be a tough thing to develop both git and the hosting / workflow business around it.

so I guess the lesson to learn is don't try to build extremely sophisticated software as a startup where there are already good enough open source alternatives.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#196

Post by carlsborg » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

> To see how this plays out for other companies consider MongoDB (valued at roughly $1.6B with ~700 employees),

Maybe another, important, lesson the RethinkDB team left out was: raise more capital than you need, and go public fast.

Two years later, MongoDB the company is now valued at $19.491B. Like many other public tech companies, it is yet to turn a single profitable quarter, and is not expected to in the next few years.

Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. Equity is negative.

Perhaps because the market thinks useful product companies will be valuable vs. the US dollar in the future. And its a vital part of many companies infrastructure these days, without much of a solid enterprise alternative.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#197

Post by fastball » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

nonpolitic wrote: post #61

> Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]: > That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job.…

We're experiencing this a bit with our startup, except we're not building developer tools, we've built a (semi-personal) knowledge management platform.

In the era of COVID, it seems like every developer with some extra free time has decided that they want to build their own PKM/note-taking/etc app, so competition has scaled up massively in the last year.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#198

Post by eternalban » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

htsh wrote: post #146

eternalban wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the technology encourages this type of behavior. And I am not speaking of hypothetical "can happen". I very recently had to deal with this precise issue. > But really, please consider that many of us have, or are as we speak, losing loved ones to a deadly sickness which you have compared to a poor database implementation. Sorry for your loss. Use of the word for non-medical concerns is common. Mongo Metastasis wo…

I agree that it is very easy to make bad decisions with this product, but I do not think it is unique to Mongo. And it is the role of a good architect or a good team lead to make sure that this does not happen or that developers do not go down these roads. I would even say the strengths that I have pointed out are precisely what makes it easier to take shortcuts. It gets out of your way, makes collections if they do…

A happy conclusion. We're in general agreement.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#199

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #190

endymi0n wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, any kind of technology in infrastructure is a prime candidate for open source, the incentives are just very much aligned there. Infrastructure tech makes for a great case that helps everyone while giving nobody a competitive advantage, that's why companies love doing or sponsoring it. On the other hand, open source tech in infrastructure helps get rid of vendor lock-in as in the worst case, you cou…

Cloud providers are proprietary infrastructure and their rapid growth shows the opposite. SQL Server, Oracle just led to AWS DynamoDB/Aurora. You don't have any source code for either. Open-source projects growing in popularity doesn't override the greater trend that companies just want solutions, whether it's open or not.

And if anything, the cloud is an even bigger moat. Which would you rather have to explain to yourself CTO as a cause of outage:

AWS had a problem or “Hosted Super Open Source Database” had a problem.

There is a reason why there is an old adage: “No one got fired for going with (IBM/Microsoft/AWS)”

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#200

Post by manigandham » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #173

As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interac…

This is life in general, not just software development.