Rethinkdb is great software that was really designed with technological goals, one after the other, in mind. I'm a bit surprised to see the company shutting down. I mean, in some way, it's years they work at the project, but in the final usable form the project is not so old after all... Anyway to make it viable for the project to have a good live as an OSS project, there is to build a big community of core developers, and that's hard, so as a first step what I would do to ensure the viability is to strip-down it as much as possible in order to reduce the codebase of the fundamental part of RethinkDB to a more manageable size/complexity.
RethinkDB is shutting down
211–220 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#212Earlier 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…
Edit - I actually meant for this to be in reply to jnordwick's comment further down thread (the one with all the rhetorical questions), but apparently I suck at clicking the right things. You seem a bit worked up, and it's hard not to read your comments in this thread in a tone which suggests you feel like you've been robbed of something. These people don't owe us anything. When a company decides to open up and publi…
Exactly this. He says people need to 'man up', when in fact he needs to 'human up'. No surprise to see that he's involved in low latency fintech.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sell support contracts. Kind of similar to MongoDB's strategy, but they were too late to the party. Also the "support" open source business model doesn't always scale well and works better when the product quality and documentation isn't so first rate (like Rethinkdb's is).
I've always found that to be a perverse incentive model. I don't know how to do any better though. Maybe shaming companies that use OS projects heavily into donating? Not really sure how to scale that either.
It can be highly perverse. I took over a project that had used the open source CMS Composite C1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_C1).
As far as I can tell the codebase is designed to be as opaque and complex as possible. Any normal organisation will pony up the fees (between $1000 and $5000 per annum - https://cms.orckestra.com/Products/Plans) rather than try to really get their head around it.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a firm line between sales and marketing these days? Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?
Marketing is about figuring out your customer's needs. Sales is about promoting your products. Both are done to sell more stuff.
Marketing is more about making the customers think they need your product.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What are you talking about man? There are tons of successful NoSQL databases with non-JSON query syntax. Neo4J, Redis... should I continue. I never missed this format using ReQL and it would be a bloat to support both in parallel.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#216Bummer. Had Rethink in my list of things to eventually tinker-with. Is it stable where it should still be considered as a viable choice for your tech stack, or is this pretty much a deal-breaker?
It's pretty stable.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#217Earlier 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…
Despite some of it's crappiness MongoDB actually has a bunch of features that other databases (such as PG) don't such as easy to set up sharding and replication.
We run Mongo side by side with PG, and even though the PG is just replicated and not also sharded like our Mongo cluster is, Mongo was more easy to configure.
I think MongoDB's biggest problem is that it was marketed as the general purpose DB in the Node.js community when actually it is a specialised tool. So now you have thousands of developers wondering why they're on this weirdly behaving document store when they could've scaled fine on something more generic like PG.
More on topic: RethinkDB was aiming to be the best of both worlds, generic like PG yet document oriented and horizontal scaling like Mongo. I think their problem is that they didn't manage to pierce the communities. It would have gone better if they had evangelists for every major platform that just produced a stream of blog posts, small open source projects and tools and crashed random meet ups.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#218If RethinkDB is really better than Mongo then where is the blog post about it? Where are all the scaffolding tools? The examples? I have only heard of Rethink because I read HN every day. But no one knows about it. That is obviously the reason it failed - bad marketing.
It sucks because the Rethink site is well designed, they have a good brand design and mascot, the docs are great, and the team is (was?) open and responsive. They talked at conferences, did podcasts, etc. A little bit of sales work and marketing would've gone a long way. Of course, it's hard to be profitable at NoSQL after Mongo either got all the hype years before or turned people off the concept entirely.
That's the problem, they were too good.
Developers like hackable systems with bugs and problems they can solve, this is how they get "experts", bigger communities grow, more posts exists, the project get more attention. E.g. WordPress, it is not one of the most used CMS out there because it is the best.
But, not always the best system is the winner.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#219This is very sad. RethinkDB is my favourite database engine of all time.
I have huge respect for the RethinkDB team - They've put the product above everything else and they've made it accessible to as many developers as possible by making it open source.
I think that in spite of this announcement, I will likely continue to use RethinkDB.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did that work out?
I should rephrase. We, the community of people using Elm/Elixir/Phoenix/RethinkDB, tried to get the name REEP to catch on. As far as the stack itself goes, it's wonderful.
Why not PEER? It's catchier, a common English word, and even kinda fitting given RethinkDB's distribution capabilities. And it has much nicer connotations than the MEAN stack.