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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#161

Post by anilgulecha »

habitue wrote: post #22
niahmiah wrote: post #2

Quite a sad development. I always thought they would have found more success if they had adopted MongoDB's API (or similar).

Personally I'm really glad we didn't go that route. ReQL is an amazing, well thought out language. You could make the same argument about Mongo should have emulated SQL. In practice other factors dominate.

Mongo already had "won" the NoSQL battle. So if rethink had made it compatible with mongo's query language, I can imagine that when Mongo was getting all the bad-press many would have jumped their backend to Rethink, without having to worry about modifying their application.

Of course, this is with the benefit of looking back, but the parent's hypothesis has legs.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#162

Post by phamilton »

guessmyname wrote: post #43
joneholland wrote: post #3

A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.

I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries…

We tried with the REEP stack. RethinkDB, Elixir, Elm, Phoenix.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#165

Post by erikpukinskis »

vacri wrote: post #77
omginternets wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because having the better product (often) doesn't matter: see Windows vs Apple in the early days. Mongo has a strong community, which translates into a plethora of articles/blog-posts/tutorials/etc that secures its niche. From there it's possible to make money with things like consulting fees to help fix the problems it created in the first place. It's all about execution. Case and point: I know what (purportedly) ma…

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…

I think Mongo lives in the "we probably shouldn't have chosen this, but it feels scarier to try to tear it out than to make do" place.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#166

Post by [deleted] »

nodesocket wrote: post #148
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…

Patrick, I am curious why Stripe didn't just acquire RethinkDB completely? Seems like you could have gotten a bargain. Their investors get some money back, you'd get their excellent intellectual property, and finally the entire functioning RethinkDB team joins Stripe. Win-win right?

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#167

Post by jkarneges »

jnordwick wrote: post #160
jkarneges wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just looking at some of the RethinkDB and ReQL stuff, I certainly wouldn't have used it. Two things hit me immediately: - bad performance - a dearth of types (literally only a single numeric type that is a 64-bit float, so that eliminates entire categories that rely on integer/fixed-precision exact arithmetic. Also, time series are seriously hurt by that decision. I've seen DBs have to move to 64-bit longs because of…

Well, to each his own, but I don't think the product was the problem. Lots of people love RethinkDB. The comments here are proof of that.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#168

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

Oh, that's why it got shut down. Thanks

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#169

Post by happertiger »

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.)

I have always wondered why there isn't a tech company that just does kick ass documentation for companies. Seems like a small group of people who make kick butt stuff in this area.

Really, you did have fantastic documentation, as the original said. Kudos.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#170

Post by gk1 »

jarcoal wrote: post #136
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?

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.

> The marketing strategy was the product itself

And we see how that worked out. Pricing is an important component of marketing, but it's not a marketing strategy in itself.

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