RethinkDB is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#111

Post by erichocean » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:51 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #106

ronreiter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?

IMO, no. Sales and marketing are pretty different things.

Marketing isn't "sales without people", and sales isn't "marketing done in person". They target different problems, and you may need one, the other, or both to be convincing, depending on the product or service.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#112

Post by dimfeld » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

longsien wrote: post #80

I love Rethink and Horizon. Are there great risks in continuing to use Rethink even if development has stopped?

Probably not. It's all open-source and they're trying to get a development community going around the project.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#113

Post by Semiapies » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

ronreiter wrote: post #96

If RethinkDB is really better than Mongo then where is the blog post about it? Where are all the scaffolding tools? The examples? I have only heard of Rethink because I read HN every day. But no one knows about it. That is obviously the reason it failed - bad marketing.

Yes, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, an X-is-Shutting-Down post about a company I've actually heard of...Well, on Hacker News."

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#114

Post by kepano » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:56 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #48

RethinkDB 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…

It's great to hear that the Rethink crew will have a home at Stripe. Seems like the perfect fit. I hope you consider putting resources behind the project. We've absolutely loved using at Lumi.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#115

Post by spullara » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:57 AM UTC

Really sorry to hear it Slava. You guys were doing great work. At the end of the day, I think that open source has really killed pure database companies aside from the incumbents. We'll see where MongoDB ends up but they have the advantage that a support contract business model works when your product needs support.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#116

Post by TheMissingPiece » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #73

Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Clearly there are some major problems that people re ignoring. If my favorite DB (I must mention Kx Systems once a month) folded, I could give you a laundry list of issues where things went sideways, but all I see is glowing praise and comments about the best tech not always winning (KDB knocks the socks off of everything, but I sure can give you…

Slava mentioned in his blog post that he would be writing some lessons learned over the upcoming months. The fact that this is an open source project that should continue to live on helps with the reception, too. It's sad news to see the company shut down, but it's positive news to know that we can still keep the project alive.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#117

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #107

scrollaway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You cannot draw that conclusion from the data at hand. There's plenty of closed source product companies that shut down because they didn't manage to make a profitable business as well.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#118

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 3:02 AM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #94

misterbowfinger wrote: post #84

Wow. I was seriously rooting for them. I'm looking forward to Slava's posts about their challenges on the business side. There's a part of me that's angry that MongoDB - which some would say has made an objectively worse product - has succeeded. My initial thought is that MongoDB has done a way, way better job at SEO. The number of blog posts about RethinkDB pales in comparison to Mongo. I wonder if they got beat on…

Mongo also got there "first". I mean, Mongo isn't much compared to Rethink, but they're both in the "not a traditional SQL database" camp and Mongo came before and had all the hype first. I wouldn't be surprised if people a) didn't use Rethink because they're happy with Mongo and its popularity b) hated Mongo and saw Rethink as too similar/didn't research it enough.

Well, Couch DB got there first but it didn't help them much. I think you're right it was mostly about social media marketing.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#119

Post by jkarneges » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 3:06 AM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #73

Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Clearly there are some major problems that people re ignoring. If my favorite DB (I must mention Kx Systems once a month) folded, I could give you a laundry list of issues where things went sideways, but all I see is glowing praise and comments about the best tech not always winning (KDB knocks the socks off of everything, but I sure can give you…

If I had to speculate, I'd say that they spent a long time in development before monetizing, longer than investors were willing to entertain. It's hard for a B2B company to raise a Series B without a thoroughly proven revenue engine.

I don't know how this could have been fixed though. Databases are hard to develop and it's a tough market to crack. Enterprises aren't going to buy an incomplete product, especially not a database, which is arguably the most critical component in the entire stack. Anyone investing would have to know that this would be a years-long effort to build a solid product before the first dollar.

Perhaps RethinkDB could have shortened their development time by not pivoting around (originally SSD optimizations, later realtime. also Horizon is a bit of a mini-pivot), but I don't know by how much.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#120

Post by api » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 3:06 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #102

heyts wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That is very good to hear. We just ported our backend to use it after evaluating many other options including managed databases.

It's really a top quality piece of software in every respect, combining much of what's good about nosql with relational features and robustness. The ease of clustering across data centers is just phenomenal.

Would still recommend it in spite of this bit of uncertainty.