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RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

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Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#211

Post by jwr »

Plugawy wrote: post #203
jwr wrote: post #173

As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interac…

I recommend reading this 3-part series on Mongo's marketing - it goes into a lot of detail why Mongo "won". https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html As a former RethinkDB user (we have migrated to Postgres) I actually don't miss it as much as I would - JSONB in PG does what we need, and the real-time features of RethinkDB never really delivered because of various performance issues in the database itself.

> As a former RethinkDB user (we have migrated to Postgres) I actually don't miss it as much

For me, JSON wasn't the important part. I wanted to have a distributed database, where a single server could disappear completely at any time and my customers would not lose any data.

There are remarkably few solutions that deliver this, though many claim to. Even fewer have been verified with Jepsen. And for all the hoopla about distributed computing using Kubernetes, I find it puzzling that so little emphasis is placed on data integrity.

Changefeeds have worked great for me as well, and I'm still trying to work out what to replace them with.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#214

Post by brigandish »

alexashka wrote: post #70
runawaybottle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market. In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form. In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, under…

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…

> What's utopian about it?

It's been known as utopian since at least the time of Thomas More[1].

> 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.

Yes, it's natural for that relationship. That does not mean that:

a) it applies to other kinds of relationship

b) it scales to all of society

In fact, it's that kind of thinking that leads to the authoritarianism of Confucianism, the tyranny of communism, and the stifling paternalism of western social democracy (among other things such as outright fascism).

Gifting worked amongst tribes because they're all related. As to Graeber, he's saying that slavery is the creation of money? No, he's too mealy mouthed for that “perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery”.

Wow, money enables slavery. What a pathetic attempt at insight and guilt by association.

Money is simply a better system than the competitors, as is liberalism - the wish that people be free to choose how they use their spending power (or gifting power, ha) - to its competitors. A gift economy was not able to lift almost the entire world out of poverty (and it will hopefully complete that effort soon[2]). Communism and socialism (not that there's a real difference) have only managed to emiserate and imprison every society it's been tried in. No thanks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JiYcV_mg6A

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#215

Post by gqewogpdqa »

akg_67 wrote: post #81
hodgesrm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always kind of amazed at the low services number on MongoDB earnings reports. It's 4-5%. This seems unusually low for enterprise database companies.

As percentage of total revenue, MongoDB service revenue is about half compared to what Oracle generates. My guess is customer churn is much higher for MongoDB.

Hmmm. Isn't customer churn public? Anyways, my guess is that the product is 1) much easier to use (less bells and whistles) 2) mongodb provides more configuration etc without charging for it.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#216

Post by gqewogpdqa »

goatinaboat wrote: post #91
Aeolun wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.

But it’s the only real player in their market Not at all. All of MongoDB is just a feature in Postgres, and Postgres does it better, and Postgres does hundreds more things too.

I like both databases. Saying that MongoDB is a subset of PostgreSQL is not right, IMO. They are both powerful databases. For legacy off-Oracle or off-SQL Server migration, PostgreSQL sure is an easier place to start (though you still likely have to re-write/re-tune your application). For new apps, you could start with either.

The idea that PostgreSQL is a superset of MongoDB is incorrect. As some examples, PostgreSQL doesn't shard, have multi-region, multi-cloud, enforce JSON schema, data governance, full JSON support, etc.

That said, PostgreSQL does do a lot of things MongoDB doesn't do.

The two products have a big feature overlap - both are great databases. I think you could build a modern app on either one. If you want to build in modern languages faster and have a more available system out of the box, I'd suggest MongoDB. If you have legacy skillsets, legacy apps, or just love relational, I'd suggest PostgreSQL.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#217

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jwr wrote: post #173

As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interac…

The software development world isn't dominated by fashions and fads.

The segment of the market that chases fashions and fads is dominated by fashions and fads. Most development is just using something old and boring like Postgres or MySQL or MSSQL or Oracle.

The problem for RethinkDB is that when you take out the fashions and fads segment and the old and boring segment, there's not much left.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#218

Post by gqewogpdqa »

carlsborg wrote: post #196

> To see how this plays out for other companies consider MongoDB (valued at roughly $1.6B with ~700 employees), Maybe another, important, lesson the RethinkDB team left out was: raise more capital than you need, and go public fast. Two years later, MongoDB the company is now valued at $19.491B. Like many other public tech companies, it is yet to turn a single profitable quarter, and is not expected to in the next few…

>Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. 2018: $154M 2019: $267M 2020: $421M 2021: $590M Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/financials?p=MDB

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#219

Post by redis_mlc »

johnnycerberus wrote: post #166
redis_mlc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he means is that if you're completely ignorant about business, then reading a financial magazine will help you level up over time. (Related: I've worked with new managers in SV who couldn't define what the words "leadership", "responsibility", "planning" or "accountability" meant, since all they knew was PHP programming.) It's a good post mortem read. I gave the same advice about "use case" as in the post mortem…

Hard to believe that reading a financial magazine written by journalists will increase your knowledge rather than an authority in the domain or a classic book on the subject.

Those are all good resources, but:

1) current publications mention familiar company names and lines of business (aka the Internet).

2) reading bite-sized nuggets of information in the Economist and financial sections is more attainable for some people. I doubt if most people on HN have read a book in the past year.

Personally I no longer read the Economist regularly because I'm beyond the material they publish, and I have no interest in anything European. (The US basically left Europe in its dust after WW2 - half of the EU member states are "sick men.") But if you haven't read about finance for decades, it's as useful as anything else.

The only important things to know about Europe now is that the CCP bought Greece's largest port, and now Greece has to vote with the CCP in the UN or other tribumals, and the economic migration from Africa has ruined the social welfare programs that US leftists admired so much.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#220

Post by assface »

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?

There is a reason why IBM still makes a lot of money on IMS.
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