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RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

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Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#181

Post by 83457 »

ptero wrote: post #153
alberth wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why Oracle in the 90s and 00s starting buying up software Application companies (Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, etc). And then in the old on-premise world, you sell them both the App and require the use of your database which is an additional sale. This strategy doesn’t work in a Cloud world though. Since customers are no longer buying the individual components (like the database) but are instead j…

IIRC, Oracle managed to get a huge, well paying customer (DoD) behind their "we build a better database" pitch. That provided enough funding, users and support to move into applications. In fact even if they didn't expand into other areas, that support could have kept them as a profitable DB company for decades.

Was this in their earliest days? Reminds me of what I read recently about IBM getting a significant contract from government, but even more importantly benefits of research, in early days of computing when they were actually behind. After that they got so far ahead they stayed the leader until the industry changed.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#182

Post by Aeolun »

senderista wrote: post #59
Aeolun wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance for my workload (writes/reads for a relatively small number of large documents) was absolutely atrocious. To the point that retrieving data based on a secondary index (of like 10000 documents) took like 5s. Then inserting the same documents took a significant (don’t remember the exact magnitude) amount of time as well. By comparison mysql does the same stuff in 50ms (or less). Everything around RethinkDB…

But, but...the data structures were all lock-free! Who cares if throughput sucked?

Yeah, let me just spin up a few hundred more servers. That’ll take care of the problem right quick!

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#183

Post by jimbokun »

RedShift1 wrote: post #133
blackrock wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s Snowflake doing? One thing these database companies have going for themselves, is that once a customer company’s data and code is locked in to a particular database, then it becomes very very hard to get out. Not impossible, but just very difficult.

I've heard this line many times but is this actually true? Are there stories or statistics of these things?

My team built our product on top of a very capable NoSQL database called MarkLogic. It had issues, but also had a lot of things it did well.

But then the original licensing agreement we had negotiated was coming to an end, and the new deal was going to be massively more expensive.

So we used this as an opportunity to rearchitect our monolith into services built on other open source data stores, that also fixed a lot of the architectural issues and technical debt we had acquired.

So to answer your question, yes it’s possible to move off of a database, if the financial incentives are great enough.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#184

Post by jimbokun »

abraxas wrote: post #34

This is akin to everyone’s dream to start a cozy, atmospheric coffee shop. These types of coffee bars fold very quickly or at best give founders years of servitude below minimum wage. The reason is that the type of behaviour this kind of establishment encourages - lounging, book reading, laptop work is exactly the opposite of the quick serve model that is conducive to high revenue. The customer loves this model, the…

Offering open source software as a service with support seemed like a solution to this problem for a while. Hipsters use your stuff for free, but then pay for support and hosted offerings once they have more money than time.

But AWS is killing this model by just offering popular open source products as a service themselves, cutting out the original developments.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#185

Post by endymi0n »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

On the other hand, any kind of technology in infrastructure is a prime candidate for open source, the incentives are just very much aligned there.

Infrastructure tech makes for a great case that helps everyone while giving nobody a competitive advantage, that's why companies love doing or sponsoring it.

On the other hand, open source tech in infrastructure helps get rid of vendor lock-in as in the worst case, you could still look inside the source code and patch things — also fancy FOSS tech makes for good community building efforts and shiny job ads, both attracting good devs.

Both effects together explain to me why open source makes for such a fierce competitor in any kind of paid infra tech, it's hard to build the momentum to outrun them.

And open core? Pretty much dead by now since as soon as the cloud providers see there's traction around any technology, they will build a hosted version, either directly or in a protocol compatible fashion.

Techies really dig this stuff (I do too), but as a business model, there aren't many worse ones in 2021.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#186

Post by jimbokun »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #124
lelanthran wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you. Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use. A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of pa…

Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me. I agree though that you should never sell to developers, most of them really don't care how they spend their time as long as they are occupied and work on something they deem interesting, so they will happily spend months or years reinventi…

The alternative to IntelliJ is not rolling your own IDE, but contributing to an open source IDE like Eclipse to get the same or similar features.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#187

Post by dominotw »

blackrock wrote: post #117
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

How’s Snowflake doing? One thing these database companies have going for themselves, is that once a customer company’s data and code is locked in to a particular database, then it becomes very very hard to get out. Not impossible, but just very difficult.

Its not difficult at all. We just moved bunch of usecases from snowflake to pinot. All I had to do was s3 export from snowflake and import into pinot.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#188

Post by dominotw »

billconan wrote: post #4

is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad? developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.

> just the db sector is bad?

how is it bad when snowflake just had the biggest tech ipo of all time.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#189

Post by alexashka »

runawaybottle wrote: post #92
alexashka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's utopian about it? What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural. People seem to think that there is money, and before money, there was barter. That's fake news made up by economists (the barter before money bit). People have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Money has been around for a few thousand in sele…

I don’t think there’s enough liquidity in your system. Let’s say I think everyone should own a house. I then go ahead and help build a house for you. I would expect many others to have the same belief and build a house for me. If at any time people decide they no longer believe in home ownership, then the house I built for you had no value since no one will build my home when it’s my turn. This wouldn’t be a problem…

Right, you can't please everyone, all of the time, you can only please some people, some of the time.

We can come up with pro and con examples for any set of ideas.

I remain of the mindset that monetary transactions within a community are a net negative, largely because I think human dignity should not be something you can purchase, sell or bargain for.

If we provide human dignity for every member and let money be something we use for nice-to-have items/services, that strikes me as a significant improvement.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#190

Post by manigandham »

endymi0n wrote: post #185
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

On the other hand, any kind of technology in infrastructure is a prime candidate for open source, the incentives are just very much aligned there. Infrastructure tech makes for a great case that helps everyone while giving nobody a competitive advantage, that's why companies love doing or sponsoring it. On the other hand, open source tech in infrastructure helps get rid of vendor lock-in as in the worst case, you cou…

Cloud providers are proprietary infrastructure and their rapid growth shows the opposite.

SQL Server, Oracle just led to AWS DynamoDB/Aurora. You don't have any source code for either. Open-source projects growing in popularity doesn't override the greater trend that companies just want solutions, whether it's open or not.

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