RethinkDB is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#171

Post by gk1 » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:53 AM UTC

ronreiter wrote: post #98

nine_k wrote: post #17

Earlier 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?

Back in 2014 I was consulting FoundationDB on marketing and customer acquisition. After FoundationDB was acquired by Apple, I got introduced to RethinkDB and was excited about the prospect of helping market another promising DB company.

Unfortunately, after a short while I stopped hearing from them. It doesn't look as though they ever brought in any marketing help since then.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#172

Post by jnordwick » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:54 AM UTC

jkarneges wrote: post #167

jnordwick wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the exact kind of comment I was warning against.

The "it surely can't be the technology!" comment when yes, Shirley, it really can be. Even the best database systems I know (orders of magnitude quantitatively better than RethinkDB) have areas of technical weakness. And not just some areas, but usual gaping valleys. Nothing does everything well, and if it tries to it usually does everything below average.

Time to man up. Performance really was crappy? That only having a float for your ONLY number type really was kind of dumb? Having no native datetime was bad? Saddling timezones on the pseudo datetime was a brainfart? Milliseconds only was shortsighted? Horizon was a bad idea too soon? Document databases are the new object databases - forever 5 years away? Aggregates were poorly done? Nobody really knew how to do stationary time series properly (I read through the GitHub issues regarding this and it was laughable that these people called themselves database experts)? and on and on.

I'm not saying all of this is true. I'm saying let's be straight and not always blame sales and marketing or dumb consumers or C-level execs or everybody but our own crappy code.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#173

Post by lobster_johnson » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:55 AM UTC

rer wrote: post #58

I wish RethinkDB had published a performance benchmark against Hadoop. It'd be enough to show the world how ahead of its times RethinkDB is. I also wish I knew what RethinkDB's investors are thinking.

By Hadoop, do you mean HBase? Something else? I'm not sure how much overlap there is. Rethink is geared towards ad-hoc OLTP-type patterns (albeit with a document-like data model), whereas Hadoop is oriented around batch/stream processing. A better comparison would be CouchDB or MongoDB.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#174

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:13 AM UTC

happertiger wrote: post #169

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you. And...hmm. That's an interesting question.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#175

Post by lifeisstillgood » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:26 AM UTC

I would be very interested hearing @coffeemug's views on the tension between building a business and building an open source product. (Those I know who have done this range from "never again" to "lost a fortune in sales")

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#176

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:27 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #159

nodesocket wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The IP is open source, and Stripe owes nothing to RethinkDB's investors. Why buy something you can have for free?

There might still be copyrights, trademarks, domains (and even patents).

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#177

Post by duncanawoods » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:34 AM UTC

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?

Building roads/bridges is probably the better analogy. Infrastructure type public goods never seems to come from donations, only taxes.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#178

Post by sseveran » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:36 AM UTC

jkarneges wrote: post #167

jnordwick wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Loving a product is somewhat orthogonal. To be successful an open source DB company needs some large customers paying to make that model work.

I dislike cassandra immensely, but I still use it every day.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#179

Post by skndr » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:47 AM UTC

Mike has been one of the most genuine and helpful people I've met - always offering to lend an ear or offer suggestions and feedback. It must be really difficult to stop doing something that's been such a core part of your effort and thoughts for so long. I hope you and the team find interesting and engaging things to work on.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#180

Post by habitue » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:53 AM UTC

cybrix wrote: post #93

This is very sad to hear this looked like a real product. Quite off-topic but has anyone managed to implement something similar to Changefeeds in MongoDB? RethinkDB sends both old data and new data and watching the oplog sounds like a bad idea.

That's what literally everyone does for changes on mongo, from Meteor to Firebase. There isn't another way