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RethinkDB is shutting down

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#221

Post by h1d »

apetresc wrote: post #74
brianwawok wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in the world can work on a large DB, even with source? I am all for open source, but it doesn't make things like this is easy as some make it out to be. For example with Linux source, how long would it take me to fix a video driver bug? Perhaps a year?

His point is a little more subtle than that. When you're choosing a database engine to build your company on, knowing that it's open source provides some level of guarantee that someone will continue to maintain it if the company/developer folds, even if that someone is not you. Therefore, if you're the one building the database, open-sourcing it de-risks your product to your potential customers, to some extent.

Someone? You shouldn't pick an opensource project hoping someone motivated picks it up soon after it's abandoned. The primary company going down is usually it, especially when the project hasn't even picked up enough community yet.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#222

Post by ithkuil »

orblivion wrote: post #189
pavlov wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just a hypothetical - if you actually own the IP, you may be able to release future versions under non-free licenses. However I don't see Stripe in the premium-DB business.

yeah. RethinkDB is AGPL, which means that some people cannot use it (e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sourc...). While a very well grounded interpretation says that merely using the AGPL'd service via a public API doesn't force you to release the clients, some companies would prefer buying a commercial license rather than facing the legal risk.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#223

Post by cryptica »

jnordwick wrote: post #160
jkarneges wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to speculate, I'd say that they spent a long time in development before monetizing, longer than investors were willing to entertain. It's hard for a B2B company to raise a Series B without a thoroughly proven revenue engine. I don't know how this could have been fixed though. Databases are hard to develop and it's a tough market to crack. Enterprises aren't going to buy an incomplete product, especially not…

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…

When you work with dynamically typed languages, the typeless nature of RethinkDB is awesome. MongoDB follows the same design.

Functionally, to me, RethinkDB was perfect. ReQL is one of the best query languages ever - It's so easy to learn and remember. I haven't operated RethinkDB at scale in production (so I can't say much about performance) but I was pretty impressed with its scalability features during testing.

I'm really more leaning towards the idea that this is purely a monetization failure. They've been going at it for 7 years - There must be a good reason why investors kept it going for so long - I think it's because of the product.

I think they did identify a good monetization strategy in the end but maybe it was too late - They dug themselves into a niche that had great long term growth potential but they didn't have the resources to wait it out any longer.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#224

Post by h1d »

A while ago, I heard how good RethinkDB is and tried to check it out and found this page.

https://rethinkdb.com/docs/sql-to-reql/javascript/

The more complex the query becomes I just felt everything was getting less intuitive compared to the SQL version and ended up not actually using it.

For anyone who switched from SQL, I'd like to know how it felt to write RethinkDB queries. Did they start to feel fluent later on?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#225

Post by miguelrochefort »

vegabook wrote: post #192
jnordwick wrote: post #73

Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Clearly there are some major problems that people re ignoring. If my favorite DB (I must mention Kx Systems once a month) folded, I could give you a laundry list of issues where things went sideways, but all I see is glowing praise and comments about the best tech not always winning (KDB knocks the socks off of everything, but I sure can give you…

> KDB knocks the socks off everything else ...but the licence is 250k dollars a year so big fail for startups.

That's the salary of a single employee. Surely they can afford a database on the payroll.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#226

Post by barrkel »

imtringued wrote: post #190
erikpukinskis wrote: post #106

Earlier 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 has always been a bit vague. Some definitions of marketing subsume the entire purpose of a company; for example, one definition is "identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably" - this could be used as the definition of a business enterprise.

IMO marketing is all about getting a good fit between what the company sells and what the market outside the company wants. It could be creating demand, so that the market changes to fit what the company creates; or it could be shaping the company's offerings to what the market is asking for; or it could be advertising, to make the market more aware of how the company's current offerings are a good solution for what the market is asking for. One way or another, it's about bridging the gap.

Sales is the process of completing profitable transactions. It's typically high-touch, one to one, and involves taking prospects, qualifying them, figuring out what they need and how the company's current offerings solve that problem in a personalized way, and managing the process to completion, and potentially further to upselling in the future. It's a pipelined process and is ultimately a numbers game, where the odds of proceeding to completion depend on both the value proposition and the salesperson's skill in communicating it.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#227

Post by davidbanham »

h1d wrote: post #224

A while ago, I heard how good RethinkDB is and tried to check it out and found this page. https://rethinkdb.com/docs/sql-to-reql/javascript/ The more complex the query becomes I just felt everything was getting less intuitive compared to the SQL version and ended up not actually using it. For anyone who switched from SQL, I'd like to know how it felt to write RethinkDB queries. Did they start to feel fluent later on?

Very. The linear flow of data from left to right made it very easy to reason about complex queries.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#228

Post by jazoom »

Kiro wrote: post #194

While RethinkDB looks amazing I'm glad I didn't listen to the people here demanding me to switch from MongoDB. In the future I will just stick with what works.

In my experience RethinkDB "just works" and Mongo didn't.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#229

Post by vegabook »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #225
vegabook wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KDB knocks the socks off everything else ...but the licence is 250k dollars a year so big fail for startups.

That's the salary of a single employee. Surely they can afford a database on the payroll.

please do introduce me to your generous VC. At current low interest rates, building a stack that is reliant on KDB, will cause a large valuation hit because you're effectively locked into a negative -250k/year cashflow in perpetuity. At a 5% discount rate for example that's more than 5m USD of inflexible negative NPV right up front. Look there are fintech applications where this will be seen as fine (right tool for the job might be the big difference between success and failure) but you'll admit that it's a big ask for the less conventional "disruptor" style businesses which may not have big ticket upfront funding.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#230

Post by colemickens »

threeseed wrote: post #76
colemickens wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...

That post is utter garbage. Seriously. Most of the the points are for issues that were fixed years ago and then you get classics like "forces the poor habit of implicit schemas in nearly all usecases" as if some developer is going to somehow stumble on the fact is it a schemaless database. It's like trying to say "Linux is shit" because of issues found in 1.0 of the kernel.

Normally when things are citing @aphyr, I tend to give them some weight, but even aphyr's post is rather old. Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more investigation before posting the link again.
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