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RethinkDB is shutting down

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#121

Post by sratner »

d23 wrote: post #65
williamstein wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell support contracts. Kind of similar to MongoDB's strategy, but they were too late to the party. Also the "support" open source business model doesn't always scale well and works better when the product quality and documentation isn't so first rate (like Rethinkdb's is).

I've always found that to be a perverse incentive model. I don't know how to do any better though. Maybe shaming companies that use OS projects heavily into donating? Not really sure how to scale that either.

I currently pay someone else to host a rethinkdb cluster. I'd rather pay rethinkdb.com to do that, but they didn't offer.

I am sure they considered it and figured it wasn't a good model for them. It is unfortunate that I have (with much pleasure) used rethinkdb in several projects, yet haven't had a chance to pay them for a service that would be useful to me.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#122

Post by vacri »

omginternets wrote: post #95
vacri wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last workplace, I finally asked: "Since you guys bitch about mongo so much, why do we use it? Why not something else?". Response: "It's not actually that bad, it does the job". Half the crap people speak about Mongo seems to be from either the early days, or from people who just like to complain. It certainly has it's issues, but there doesn't seem to be much community will to replace it with $superdupernosqldb…

Also not the point.

I thought I was supporting your argument about network effects and will to change.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#124

Post by latch »

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.

I'm not sure if anyone else ran into this, but I evaluated RethinkDB for three separate projects over the years, and there was always that one missing feature. I don't remember exactly what they were, but I think the first time it was secondary indexes, the second was full text search and the third was geo indexes.

Went with Postgres for all three.

When Windows Phone 7 came out, without background tasks, MS was quick to point out that the iPhone didn't originally have it either. It was a silly argument; Neither Apple nor Google were selling phones without that feature at that time.

I'm not saying Rethink did anything wrong. And by bringing up MS, I don't want anyone to think Rethink had the same sense of entitlement as Microsoft.

Your v1 has to compete against your competitors current version, not their 5-year old v1. RethinkDB had a lot of powerful features, but it also lacked a lot of features that for me, and I have to suspect many others, made it an impossible choice.

(Also, I hated the query syntax. I was willing to fight through it, but I often wondered if that was turning people off)

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#125

Post by haimez »

threeseed wrote: post #70
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay...but if Rethink couldn't make their business self-sustaining, why would Mongo when there are a plethora of other open source databases/datastores that can do Mongo's job better than Mongo? EDIT: We'll just wait for Mongo to burn through all their cash then.

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.

You are a gem.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#126

Post by TheMissingPiece »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #23
tbrock wrote: post #5

I hope this isn't true. Having worked at/on multiple competitors I have nothing but respect and admiration for the work the RethinkDB team has done to make a great database and development platform. This was real technology! I'm truly sad that the environment is such that great work like this can't continue to be funded. Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation, caring about the fundamentals, an…

Everyone at RethinkDB was incredible to work with. Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation Thank you! (Really. I'm RethinkDB's documentation writer/editor.)

<3

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#127

Post by sbuttgereit »

geofft wrote: post #91
hueving wrote: post #88

Earlier 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?

Or maybe they don't, but somehow that money still exists. How does that work?

This isn't that difficult of a question.

1) Universities get money from the students who pay tuition and fees for their education. 2) Universities get money from wealthy benefactors who donate their money to a cause they believe in. 3) Universities get money from for-profit companies that have sufficient commercial success to invest into research and such for what they hope will be later commercial benefit. 4) Universities get money from people who confiscated the money from other people, under threat of force and who might not have given it otherwise, and give it to a cause they believe in.

Not necessarily in that order by whatever measure you may choose. Note that, In no case did the wealth magically just appear. The wealth to consume was produced somewhere by someone.

Sounds like you're proposing 4 as you imply that the we that is not the companies won't be trying to create the wealth you want to use in your cause.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#128

Post by GordyMD »

I'm very upset to hear this. RethinkDB, and the team behind it, have been inspirational to me and it has transformed my day to day development workflow. Their dedication to developer experience (amazing docs, ReQL, admin tool,...) has been something I've particularly admired. I'm relieved that the team has a new home though and it's fantastic that a company that has similar traits is the destination - props to Stripe and the RethinkDB management team for making this happen.

I hope to see RethinkDB to live on in the OS community.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#129

Post by Rapzid »

latch wrote: post #124
sotojuan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure if anyone else ran into this, but I evaluated RethinkDB for three separate projects over the years, and there was always that one missing feature. I don't remember exactly what they were, but I think the first time it was secondary indexes, the second was full text search and the third was geo indexes. Went with Postgres for all three. When Windows Phone 7 came out, without background tasks, MS was quick…

I'm genuinely surprised at the number of people who vetted RethinkDB and are now really concerned with this news. With the number of solutions out there to accomplish the same or more RethinkDB almost seems like a novelty choice. Surely the decision to make it business critical came with the understanding and acceptance that the company might go bust? I'm not sure what was accomplishable with RethinkDB that wasn't with any number of other alternatives or combinations of alternatives.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#130

Post by 010a »

colemickens wrote: post #31
bhouston wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. Well promoted and easy to get going with. Hopefully they use the money they have to rewrite MongoDB to be better.

>MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...

Most of those points are fearmongering, outdated, opinions, or improperly cited. Every database has problems. Mongo has more than most. But I honestly think people dislike it so vehemently primarily because they've monetized so strongly.
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