Why is there no "Pricing" section on their website? how were they making money? (if any)
RethinkDB is shutting down
101–110 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#102RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a database could be and how it should work. I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort. I'm also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we've gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Reth…
As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product. On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/
Slava @ Rethink here.
The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#103Does anyone have experience with Postgres' pubsub[1] as a means for realtime apps? 1. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/sql-notify.html
One of the big differences that RethinkDB has going for it is that its connections are based on coroutines, so it's really efficient to have thousands of open connections. Postgres uses one process per connection, so it's much harder to scale.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
MongoDB is killing it in the Big Data space right now with excellent integrations with Spark and Hadoop, strong relationships with Hortonworks and Cloudera and really good enterprise support. I know many Fortune 500 companies and equivalents overseas who are customers. But please enlighten us poor fools which open source databases can compete with MongoDB in this space. It sure as hell isn't PostgreSQL.
But are people paying for it if MongoDB is "killing it". If not, no business model.
Yes. Enterprise companies are paying for it many you would know e.g. eBay, LinkedIn, Adobe etc.
In Big Data specifically when we are spending tens of millions on Hadoop/Spark/NVidia clusters buying a few extra licenses for MongoDB is nothing. And what makes Big Data even more compelling for database vendors is that often by law or for privacy reasons we are forced to run everything inhouse i.e. strictly no cloud.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works the opposite way too. If a project is open source then who is committed to helping you support and maintain it? You essentially need to have a team to do it. If there's a company behind it, it gives you assurances. Especially for a small company that needs to focus on building a product rather than committing features and bug fixes to their database
You can have an open source product with a company behind it, they're not incompatible.
Right. My point was more that being open source in its own isn't always enough. Having a company behind it makes a difference to many people - more than the distinction between open vs closed.
I was able to sell our company on Cassandra because there is a Datastax there to support it when the shit hits the fan.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever thought what do these salespeople do in a software company? This is what happens when salespeople fail to do enough of their thing. Sales are essential for a for-profit company.
Not sales. Marketing. In today's world having someone push a new database for a hefty price is not going to work. I would need to be able to test it against mongo and decide myself that it is better... but how would I know it's even an option?
Is there a firm line between sales and marketing these days? Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works the opposite way too. If a project is open source then who is committed to helping you support and maintain it? You essentially need to have a team to do it. If there's a company behind it, it gives you assurances. Especially for a small company that needs to focus on building a product rather than committing features and bug fixes to their database
You can have an open source product with a company behind it, they're not incompatible.
Of course the entire point of this particular article is that they are pretty difficult to make profitable
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#108I just want to personally thank Slava for his exceptional work over the past few years - at every step him and his team have been classy and professional, and brought real creativity and intelligence to the world of databases and startups. Its clear to me that Rethink is the model for future databases - its just that DBs have a long gestation as no-one wants to risk their data until the code is aged like a fine wine.…
I'm not sure you can chalk this up to a failure of capitalism. Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. People like to hate on mysql/mariadb, but it also has a massive open source community. As a company choosing open source technologies, the popularity is important . Otherwise you run into issues finding answers to common problems and you end up paying through the nose for suppor…
> Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source.
Presumably, that's in part why CockroachDB decided to be more-or-less Postgres-compatible on the wire, and embraced SQL.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non profit companies still need to make money to keep the lights on. That means targeting technologies that can attract lots of donations. Databases are a very mature technology so the number of companies running into issues with them is vanishingly small. Who is going to donate to a non profit spending its time developing a solution a problem almost nobody has?
I don't know, I feel like lots of people donate to universities to spend their times solving problems that almost nobody has. Or maybe they don't, but somehow that money still exists. How does that work? Why are we assuming that everything has to be done by companies? What if we establish a National Science Foundation for fundamental CS research?
If you’re not getting paid by your users, then you often get something cool, but maybe not something you want to go to production with.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope it wouldn't take you a year to hire someone qualified to fix it for you.
If open source only works when you pay for it, it's just an abstraction layer around ordinary commercial software, with the same pressures. In fact, most of the people qualified to fix Linux video drivers are already employed full-time at a graphics card manufacturer (with its sales pressures) or a commercial redistributor (with its sales pressures). You could pay one of those companies for a support contract. But ot…
With ordinary proprietary software, there's only one team in the world you could possibly hire for maintenance, and if they're too busy or have a conflict of interest you're just screwed. Competition among maintainers should make them more efficient and scale better.