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

RethinkDB Postmortem

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 270 posts

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#101

Post by mythz »

slake wrote: post #26
StavrosK wrote: post #5

I don't know, my personal opinion was that RethinkDB had its head on straight, MongoDB is garbage and still neither is so much better than PostgreSQL that I will switch away from it. Postgres is the default datastore (because schemas are awesome) for me, and I haven't had a use case yet where I needed something that Postgres wouldn't do. Maybe if you have a very specific need, you'd reach for another datastore (come…

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.

JetBrains DataGrip is also worth considering - another polished quality app from JetBrains: https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#102

Post by robot »

I really appreciate the time and effort to share such an analysis. I disagree with the perspective that users think the product is in the open source tools market. Open source tools market is where the company ends up as a consequence of the product not being compelling enough for a commercial use case.

5-6 years ago I thought wow this is a really complicated product (a better database?) and I hope they pull it off as a startup.

IMO the biggest issues are (a) a database is a complicated product and (b) there are many options that are good enough and stable. You have to do 10x better than the status quo and that is very hard to do in a space where products are complicated.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#103

Post by Patrick_Devine »

coffeemug wrote: post #32

Hey all, author here. FYI, the post is still in its unpublished state. It's basically right, but I've been meaning to edit it for tone and rewrite the market failure section for clarity. Didn't get the chance to do that before it made it on HN, so keep in mind that you're reading a (late) draft.

Did you ever consider partnering with a larger vendor?

Figuring out the right GTM is tough, and the timing was weird, but GOOG and MSFT must have been pretty desperate for a NoSQL solution 2013-2014 to compete with DynamoDB. Firebase got scooped up in October 2014, but it wasn't until April 2015 when Azure announced DocumentDB.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#104

Post by jwr »

I am using RethinkDB in PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/). I initially picked it because I wanted a JSON document database that has a correctly implemented distributed story. But later on it turned out that the realtime-push (changefeeds) functionality is actually fundamental for me. I used it to build an app where every open sessions gets instant updates.

Right now I don't know what other database I could use, because I found no other solution that supports this kind of functionality, especially in a distributed setting.

I agree with most of your analysis and I think that the most important part is about "worse is better": many of your potential customers won't understand or won't care about correctness or consistency.

That said, I really like RethinkDB (oh, it does have its warts, but overall it's great), I'm very thankful for it, and I hope it will continue as an open-source project.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#105

Post by rumcajz »

I love the postmortem culture and it's great to see people writing postmortems even when they don't have to. It would be nice to get to a point where postmortem is something that occurs naturally, with people expecting it and getting confused and asking questions if it didn't.

One can even imagine a future where each court case is followed by a postmortem. Possible bullet points:

1. Was this an actual problem? Did anybody get hurt? If not so, what's wrong with the law? How should we fix it?

2. What were the ultimate causes of the problem? Ok, A killed B, but why? Could it have been prevented?

3. What are the action items to prevent this exact scenario from happening again? Who's assigned to each action item? What's the deadline for the item?

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#106

Post by Plugawy »

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.

coffeemug explained it himself in a podcast where he was interviewed about Rethinkdb (I don't remember the name of the podcast). Basically it boiled down to the fact that all existing databases (at that time) could be tuned with very little effort to take advantage of SSDs so that differentiating factor flew through the window

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#108

Post by boubiyeah »

jwr wrote: post #104

I am using RethinkDB in PartsBox ( https://partsbox.io/ ). I initially picked it because I wanted a JSON document database that has a correctly implemented distributed story. But later on it turned out that the realtime-push (changefeeds) functionality is actually fundamental for me. I used it to build an app where every open sessions gets instant updates. Right now I don't know what other database I could use, becau…

Agreed, there is still a market for that imo. couchDB has it, but it's so slow :( Right now if you want a good DB and a pubsub/notification/streaming capability, that means either increased latency (polling the DB in your application layer and handle the notifications there) or using another dedicated system (kafka, redis, etc) with all the added complexity that introduce :(

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#109

Post by v3ss0n »

coffeemug wrote: post #32

Hey all, author here. FYI, the post is still in its unpublished state. It's basically right, but I've been meaning to edit it for tone and rewrite the market failure section for clarity. Didn't get the chance to do that before it made it on HN, so keep in mind that you're reading a (late) draft.

Sorry i am the one who leaked . @coffeemug we greatly appreciate your effort and rethinkDB is well architectured database in existance. We gonna keep using it and contribute to Rethinkdb .

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#110

Post by justinclift »

davyjones wrote: post #98
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 developed and use(d) pgxplorer (github.com/pgxplorer). So, I can tell you this: the best out there is psql (CLI). There exists no use case where a GUI is better than psql.

Not even diagramming relationships between tables?
Post reply on HN