I don't know what to think. I am angry and sad that my favorite db is going away?! On the other hand, I am trying to understand and be supportive of the team behind it, as I have huge respect for them and their work.
RethinkDB is shutting down
131–140 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#132I used Slava's blog to learn about Lisp and went on to build a product with Weblocks, which was a continuations-based web framework that Slava created back in the day (I only recently finally deleted a forgotten 8-year old todo about merging in my refactored Weblocks formview). Random trivia (kind of) - the syntax and concepts in Weblocks actually bear some resemblance to Goat, which is a framework that Patrick had created and used to build the original version of the Stripe dashboard (likely just because both of them come from a Lisp-heavy background).
I had just started a new company using RethinkDB, and it was definitely poised to be my go to database for new projects. Anyway, all this is to say, for someone who I know only through his works, I have great respect for Slava and want to thank him for the work he's done. Here's to hoping that RethinkDB finds a way to continue.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#133Why 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…
He literally said he'd be following up with lessons learned. Now is the time for pats on the back.
Communities are supposed to be supportive, too. Pity this thread is the only time I've seen that on HN as of late!
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#134Why 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…
> Horizon is a bit of a mini-pivot
When Horizon was announced, that's when I stopped even considering RethinkDB for new projects (even if it was a good fit, feature-wise). Call it a "business smell", but I'm not surprised to hear they've wound the business down.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#135RethinkDB 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…
The comments section here can be brutal and God knows I've been responsible for some of it, which makes seeing comments like this all the more heartening.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#136Earlier 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?
The marketing strategy was the product itself, given that it was free, as well as the open development process.
And I do think that strategy was working to some degree; at least on channels like HN where we frequently saw posts related to RethinkDB.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#137Earlier 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.
They largely did with version 3.0 when they switched to Wiredtiger. https://objectrocket.com/blog/company/mongodb-wiredtiger It's made a massive difference to performance and stability.
Sounds like it hasn't helped with consistency
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#138Does 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
I migrated a project from RethinkDB to Postgres and replaced the changefeeds with a trigger that uses NOTIFY, does the same thing except that with the changefeeds I had the diff and with this trigger I still have to re-fetch the row and compare the diff.
https://gist.github.com/bithavoc/f40bbc33b553f2fddf9e1095858...
Something that RethinkDB supported natively :(
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#139Slava is one of the smartest people I've met (and I'm sure the rest of the team follows suite) - it's indeed sad that the RethinkDB company is no more.
I feel we're at a stage where some of the key technologies/platforms are coming out of relatively small companies (docker, storm, rethinkdb, to name a few), however, it appears it can be tough to make a business out of this alone.
I'm consequently very happy to see that the RethinkDB team have found a home at Stripe and hope that works as a setup to allow the talent to flourish and keep producing great work/innovations.