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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#131

Post by v3ss0n »

v3ss0n wrote: post #130
smhg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all: this is great, thank you so much! Secondly, and with the risk of hijacking the OP: I think it would be a good thing if you could put a status update either on rethinkdb.com or ~the first paragraph of the readme on GitHub about what you are trying to accomplish related to the name/rights/ownership/license/... I check those about once a month to see if something has changed. As a current user and someone…

I am just one of RethinkDB community. i am waiting to contribute donations to RethhinkDB when it have foundation up and running. I don't think Rethinkdb.com is under control of the Current Leadership Team . But it would be very good idea to put the status updates in ReadMe. I will submit a PR on it. Development is still continuing , but slowly. It is close to release 2.4, @atnnn and @srh is working on it. > Bugfixes…

also join us on https://rethinkdb.slack.com/messages/open-rethinkdb/ for more updated info

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#132

Post by antirez »

This was an excellent reading. No surprise given the author. I think there is a missing element about this in the post:

> Correctness. We made very strict guarantees, and fulfilled them religiously.

It is true that the user base did not recognize this as important as the RethinkDB team, also because there is part of the development community which is very biased towards this aspect of correctness, at the point that you literally never experienced a problem for years with a system, but then a blog post is released where the system is shown to be not correct under certain assumptions, and you run away. So part of the tech community started to be very biased about the importance of correctness. But 99% of the developers actually running things were not.

Correctness is indeed important, and most developers have indeed less interest that they should have in formal matters that have practical effects. However, I don't think this point can be simply reduced to developers ignorance, that make them just wanting the DB to be fast in micro benchmarks. Another problem is use cases: despite what top 1% people say, many folks have use cases where to be absolutely correct all the time is not as important as raw speed, so the reason they often don't care is that they often can actually avoid caring at all about correctness, as long as things kinda work, while they absolutely need to care about raw speed in order to take things up with a small amount of hardware.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#133

Post by neoeldex »

v3ss0n wrote: post #112

Hello HN , sorry for the early leak. I posted as I've discovered on github after looking around rethinkdb progress. RethinkDB as a product is not dead.The community and one of ex RethinkDB senior developer are still maintaining it. Since it is fully Opensourced , we are welcoming contributors , lets make RethinkDB great , together! https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb Here are current rehtinkdb plans : https://docs…

Haven't tried recently, but the only way to install RethinkDB on my machine (ubuntu) was running the docker image. Is it currently fixed again?

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#134

Post by tom_mellior »

lvca wrote: post #111

Nice reading and Kudos to the entire RethinkDB team for what they have done, especially the evangelization of the Reactive Model in the database. This inspired other vendors like OrientDB to do the same. Running a company where a large part of the users is developers is very hard. The secret sauce is providing a good product and create a business where some of the users would pay to have something more, like support…

> The secret sauce is providing a good product and create a business where some of the users would pay to have something more, like support and/or an Enterprise edition.

I was wondering about this, as it's not explicit in the article: What is the business model that makes money for Docker and MongoDB? From MongoDB's website I gather they have some "Enterprise" things, but they want me to give them my personal data just to access a "datasheet" describing this. Docker's "Enterprise" offering seems to be a mix of support and hosting.

So is that it? Support, hosting, and donations from Big Business?

The article also says: "Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee", but I don't understand what those users would have payed for. What was the product being sold? All I can gather from the article is some cloudy hosty database-as-a-service thing that might have made money but never shipped.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#135

Post by noir-york »

atmosx wrote: post #95
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.

Thanks for the post. One can feel your pain flowing through it. I have a rather naive question: Why do you recommend "the Economist" as oppose to something like the HBR?

I've read the Economist for the last 20 years and the HBR for a few months before I dropped it.

The Economist offers insight, thoughtful analysis and writes about the world: literally but also politics, culture, and science. The obituary is surprisingly fascinating for instance. You may not always agree with its position, but you know that their position will be worth engaging with and thinking about.

No, I don't work for the Economist, I just appreciate thoughtful articles. Same goes for Private Eye, Foreign Affairs, New Yorker.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#136

Post by niftich »

tom_mellior wrote: post #134
lvca wrote: post #111

Nice reading and Kudos to the entire RethinkDB team for what they have done, especially the evangelization of the Reactive Model in the database. This inspired other vendors like OrientDB to do the same. Running a company where a large part of the users is developers is very hard. The secret sauce is providing a good product and create a business where some of the users would pay to have something more, like support…

> The secret sauce is providing a good product and create a business where some of the users would pay to have something more, like support and/or an Enterprise edition. I was wondering about this, as it's not explicit in the article: What is the business model that makes money for Docker and MongoDB? From MongoDB's website I gather they have some "Enterprise" things, but they want me to give them my personal data ju…

Support. Notwithstanding more widely accepted benefits of support like a direct line to the product's experts and in some cases, developers, big orgs are political tinderboxes and you're always one bad downtime away from an internal catastrophe, let alone an outage that affects customers. It's therefore often politically wise for decision-makers to purchase support even in cases where the risk analysis might show that internal talent resolve or work around most issues.

This is a variation of the "no one ever got fired for IBM" trope, and is in fact a big moneymaker for the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and the like, even in situations where the standard notions of vendor lock-in may not even apply.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#137

Post by yummyfajitas »

kazagistar wrote: post #70
yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond "low learning curve". It's my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great. Think about some examples. MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded.…

Intellectual is the wrong target, just as much as easy. Humans have a limited capacity to understand complex systems, and once they grow to a certan point, your ability to integrate and innovate on them is limited due to overhead of the layers of incedental complexity. Easy is just shoving complexity under the rug. Simplicity, and building systems meant for our meager human intelligences is better. I am not terribly…

The thing is, the modern systems are often less complex. SQL databases are generally far simpler than MongoDB - you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB.

As for Java + async + threads, I use Akka and it's basically seamless. But Netty + core Java Executors is fine too, just more verbose.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#138

Post by cmdkeen »

beachy wrote: post #52
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.

Kudos on a magnificent post, and of course commiserations. One thing resonated strongly with me. When we started out many years ago someone said to me that the worst market you could go after was to target developers. Case in point - every developer who's ever put up a web site has built or thought about building a CMS. There must be thousands upon thousands of them, virtually all with a price of $0. Who would want t…

IT people try and "trip you up" because we've been burnt so many times in the past with systems that don't do what is promised by the sales people, don't integrate well and who stiff you during the implementation phase.

HR people are some of the worst because everything is super secret and they don't want to get IT involved, then they go and buy a system that lets you insert a carriage return into the phone number field and produces CSV files that don't have primary keys for data extracts.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#139

Post by v3ss0n »

neoeldex wrote: post #133
v3ss0n wrote: post #112

Hello HN , sorry for the early leak. I posted as I've discovered on github after looking around rethinkdb progress. RethinkDB as a product is not dead.The community and one of ex RethinkDB senior developer are still maintaining it. Since it is fully Opensourced , we are welcoming contributors , lets make RethinkDB great , together! https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb Here are current rehtinkdb plans : https://docs…

Haven't tried recently, but the only way to install RethinkDB on my machine (ubuntu) was running the docker image. Is it currently fixed again?

it can be easily installed on Ubuntu:

source /etc/lsb-release && echo "deb http://download.rethinkdb.com/apt $DISTRIB_CODENAME main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rethinkdb.list wget -qO- https://download.rethinkdb.com/apt/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install rethinkdb

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#140

Post by raverbashing »

antirez wrote: post #132

This was an excellent reading. No surprise given the author. I think there is a missing element about this in the post: > Correctness. We made very strict guarantees, and fulfilled them religiously. It is true that the user base did not recognize this as important as the RethinkDB team, also because there is part of the development community which is very biased towards this aspect of correctness, at the point that y…

I'd say that for more than 90% of potential RethinkDB users there's no need for guaranteed correctness (several exception are in FinTech or similar areas)

But even in those cases, the operation can be retried or the operation could take longer

If you're "Social startup of the year" it doesn't matter if one post appear to some followers 100ms later than they should be.

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