Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RethinkDB Postmortem

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 270 posts

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#191

Post by FooBarWidget »

sytse wrote: post #6
hkailahi wrote: post #2

I'm surprised there are no comments here, this is the best thing I've seen on HN in a while.

I agree, let me take a stab at starting the conversation. First of all, huge respect to Slava for this writeup. Having your startup fail is hard and it is not the time you want to blog about it. RethinkDB going broke was a sad thing to see for me, I can't imagine how it felt for him. I think the analysis of the two root causes (hard market, focus on the wrong metrics) is accurate. It is very sad to see that in the en…

Thanks for your insights on this postmortem Sytse. Love how you are leading Gitlab.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#192

Post by Zak »

As a user of databases, I've been shocked by MongoDB's popularity in light of its apparent disregard for correctness and reliability. I used it once to cache a processed form of some data that could be regenerated. One unclean shutdown and it lost that data. I tried using some of the provided recovery tools and failed to recover the data.

That was it. Every time MongoDB has come up in conversation since, I've said "Mongo eats your data" and recommended another solution, even though I'm pretty sure that particular bug was fixed long ago. You had one job, MongoDB.

I see this as equivalent to a company marketing a smartphone with an impressive feature set and a high rate of bursting in to flames. Most owners would return their recalled phones and think twice about buying the next model from that manufacturer.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#193

Post by jrudolph »

bcantrill wrote: post #10

Fascinating read, albeit a sad one: I love RethinkDB, and use it personally every day in our particular production deployment.[1] But -- and to Slava's point -- we didn't/don't/wouldn't pay for it, and in that regard, we were part of the problem. That said, the constraint on that particular problem was that it had to be open source, and if it couldn't have been RethinkDB, it would have been some other open source dat…

> the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software and it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will.

I strongly disagree with that. Take RavenDB, which is very much comparable to RethinkDB in terms of a business is dual licensed as AGPL and has a commercial license available [1]. This forces any business doing non-OSI approved OSS work to purchase a commercial license. I don't know too much about RethinkDB but I think they must have used a very similar licensing strategy?

From an outsiders' perspective, RavenDB appears to be going strong and doing well commercially. They are hiring and expanding and have invested a lot into v.4.0, which I'm really excited about.

Interestingly, on the spectrum between MongoDB and RethinkDB in terms of "Wrong metrics of goodness" (Correctness, Simplicity of the Interface) they appear to me much closer to RethinkDB than MongoDB. In terms of stability, they may have been somewhat in the middle (e.g. not as bad as MongoDB, but probably not as good as RethinkDB). And they have moved very fast to add features and fix bugs in the product. It's a really nice DB to work with as a dev, I suppose the #1 reason they are not as successful as Mongo is that they're coming from the .NET niche...

[1] https://ayende.com/blog/4508/comments-on-ravendb-licensing

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#194

Post by palerdot »

Totally off topic - In mobiles, tables are stripped off while the rest of the content is responsive. There is no scroll bar and no way to read the data given in the table from mobile. Hope Github fixes it.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#195

Post by daxorid »

Anecdotal data point of one: the primary reason we decided not to use RDB after our evaluation was performance. Queries over even small data sets, with secondary indexes, were painfully slow.

We really wanted to believe in the idea, but the implementation left much to be desired.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#196

Post by atis »

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 all your work.

I understand that you're waiting for a legal framework to accept donations as an organization, but there was an article recently about an individual GIMP developer being funded on patreon. Is this something you would consider? I'd be happy to contribute to someone who's actively working on RethinkDB (of course without any backer rewards or similar expectations), and perhaps others would as well.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#197

Post by Xixi »

boulos wrote: post #45
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.

First, thanks for your candor in this. If you're open to edits, the $200k revenue/employee rule of thumb really doesn't make a lot of sense when you're comparing your three alternate business models (Hosted Rethink, DBaaS Rethink and "Hey, maybe PaaS on top of Rethink?"). Like you, I thought it would be way too hard to run a service (my own company was encouraged to do so, and we shied away for it for the same reason…

I might be wrong by I think you missed maybe the most important keyword: backup. You can't fix a missing/corrupted backup, at this point it's too late. So you need to get it right. It's not like, say, configuring nginx. If you get nginx wrong you just fix it. If you need a backup and it's not there you can't fix it, it's (likely) game over.

So outsourcing the database is a very logical thing to do: if you can trust a third party to have a reliable backup/recovery story, that's one thing that can kill your business that you don't have to worry about.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#198

Post by martincmartin »

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 writing this, and writing it with candor.

What do you think of Spolsky's "Good software takes 10 years"?

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#199

Post by andrewbarba »

Perceptes wrote: post #9

I really appreciate the deep introspection in this post. We can all learn a lot from it. I'm one of the (possible minority) of HN users that doesn't care about startups and business, so for me the takeaway was about how choosing quality and correctness over speed works out in the real world. It seems that you really can't take the idealist approach to quality that RethinkDB took. The world just isn't willing to wait,…

I was a huge advocate of RethinkDB, absolutely love what Slava and the team were able to accomplish, but I am having a really hard time digesting that "Correctness", "Simplicity of the interface" and "Consistency" were the issue here. Example: Realm.

I can only imagine what the team at Realm is thinking after going through comments and the post-mortem. Realm was an open-source mobile first database for the past 3 years. It's free. Its the most correct, consistent, and simple mobile database that is running on millions of devices[1] (Yup fine, kind of my opinion but trust me mobile community will back this up). They ship FAST, they ship real USECASES. They just recently entered the cloud space with their Mobile Database Platform, and they are even experimenting with new things like a version built for Node.js.

I'm honestly not trying to make a specific point, but asking more questions... Is mobile different? Is it easier? Are mobile developers more willing to try new technology? Are they more willing to pay for technology? (Realm is free, haven't paid them a penny, so not sure about this one...)

My main point I guess is that it's not a terrible market, Realm made it work with VERY similar ideals and goals. So what else is going on here?

[1] https://realm.io/news/jp-simard-realm-core-database-engine/

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#200

Post by abakker »

sametmax wrote: post #148
cmdkeen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

It hurts because I lived it so many times. The "you can't understand", "it's complicated", "it's a HR thing" is such bullshit.

Everyone walks on eggshells around HR for "compliance" stuff. Anecdotally, I've not see a whole lot of compliant practices in the stuff HR wants. The high end HR solutions tend to enforce it, but there are always amazingly bad home grown tools sitting around to allow you to "pull a list of all our employees and all our data to a CSV" and then you find out the person converted that CSV to a google doc...(I've not seen anything that combined all these steps exactly this way, but I've seen each of these steps. The more legacy the tools, the worse)
Post reply on HN