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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#231

Post by miguelrochefort »

vegabook wrote: post #229
miguelrochefort wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You're right. I did not think this through.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#232

Post by JulianMorrison »

I think I'm gonna try and teach myself to work on this in its new open source incarnation, because I was rooting for it hard while it was still a company, but it was perpetually in a state of "soon, not yet", and now "not yet" is never unless the people who want it step up.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#233

Post by [deleted] »

chanux wrote: post #198
pc wrote: post #48

RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a database could be and how it should work. I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort. I'm also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we've gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Reth…

I secretly (not 'secret' anymore I guess) and irrationally trust Stripe to do good on RethinkDB. Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco. Yeah defmarco, that's how I read it for a long time. I especially love this piece from defmarco http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#234

Post by hasch »

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?

In general, I don't like those X-to-Y translation pages, when the underlying concepts fundamentally change. You can't use your existing sql mindset to translate to their query language, but instead try to learn from scratch.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#235

Post by dkersten »

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?

I haven't used RethinkDB in ages, but when I did, I used it exclusively for a year.

It took a few weeks for ReQL to really sink in, but once it did, I much preferred it to SQL. As my sibling comment says, its very linear: do this then this then this then this. It also feels very much like sequence processing in functional languages (and I was using Clojure at the time, so it really meshed very well).

I also found it much easier (than SQL, at least in my limited experience) to reason about performance because I knew what it was doing. Is this looked up by index? Yes, because that's the command I used.

So, yeah, ReQL actually ended up being one of the things I liked most about RethinkDB.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#236

Post by _benedict »

jnordwick wrote: post #172
jkarneges wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to each his own, but I don't think the product was the problem. Lots of people love RethinkDB. The comments here are proof of that.

This is the exact kind of comment I was warning against. The "it surely can't be the technology!" comment when yes, Shirley, it really can be. Even the best database systems I know (orders of magnitude quantitatively better than RethinkDB) have areas of technical weakness. And not just some areas, but usual gaping valleys. Nothing does everything well, and if it tries to it usually does everything below average. Time…

Having worked for a successful(ish) database vendor, I can say that user stupidity (ignorance) is a major factor in database software success.

Literally no users, and almost no employees at the vendors, I would bet (if my experience is not unique) have any idea of the qualities of the software they use/peddle, its semantics or guarantees, or its performance characteristics or how to use it correctly.

This makes the technology secondary; what is most important is how well you carve out mindshare. Whether that is even primarily down to "good" marketing is something I doubt. In the modern saturated database market, it is entirely unclear to me how you win sufficient mindshare and trust to obtain a wide enough (paying) userbase.

I have no idea if RethinkDB was "good" or not, as I did not take the time to investigate; I have little interest in "document stores". It actually seemed to me they had some pretty solid engineering foundations; the kind of thing that the industry should value highly, but due to poor information is unable to price into their purchasing decision, and as a result is missing in many modern (especially OSS) database offerings today.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#237

Post by dkersten »

sratner wrote: post #121
d23 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I currently pay someone else to host a rethinkdb cluster. I'd rather pay rethinkdb.com to do that, but they didn't offer. I am sure they considered it and figured it wasn't a good model for them. It is unfortunate that I have (with much pleasure) used rethinkdb in several projects, yet haven't had a chance to pay them for a service that would be useful to me.

I've actually wondered about this too. I would happily pay rethinkdb.com for hosted rethinkdb :-(

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#238

Post by tkyjonathan »

misterbowfinger wrote: post #84

Wow. I was seriously rooting for them. I'm looking forward to Slava's posts about their challenges on the business side. There's a part of me that's angry that MongoDB - which some would say has made an objectively worse product - has succeeded. My initial thought is that MongoDB has done a way, way better job at SEO. The number of blog posts about RethinkDB pales in comparison to Mongo. I wonder if they got beat on…

Still, the market for companies willing to pay for databases in NoSQL is absolutely tiny. If those NoSQL products want to grab a share of the SQL world which does have money, they are competing with very serious vendors. So the market is consolidating. Its just the way it goes.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#239

Post by tkyjonathan »

fusiongyro wrote: post #151
Rapzid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely surprised at the number of people who vetted RethinkDB and are now really concerned with this news. With the number of solutions out there to accomplish the same or more RethinkDB almost seems like a novelty choice. Surely the decision to make it business critical came with the understanding and acceptance that the company might go bust? I'm not sure what was accomplishable with RethinkDB that wasn't wi…

RethinkDB really managed to build quite a lot of positive feelings in me on the back of not very much technology. But what technology was there seemed very robust. Just kind of incomplete. My situation was very similar to latch's above. I vetted it earlier this year, after having developed warm fuzzy feelings for it last year at another company. We wound up going with Postgres + Solr because A) we've used them before…

Mongo may have been to ship non-acid compliant garbage, but MySQL just shipped with less features than Postgres.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#240

Post by hmexx »

k__ wrote: post #207

Interesting, I expected ArangoDB close shop before RethinkDB. I found both nice and even built a product on top of rethink over the last twelve months. Guess I was blended by the hype :D

I would have guessed the same, just by amount of splash RethinkDB had on YC compared to Arango, but the truth is I MUCH prefer ArangoDB. Their AQL is a beautiful replacement for SQL. Javascript style query languages are what I hate the most about a lot of NoSQL Databases. The multi-model support is also really cool, i.e. not having to commit to graph/non-graph before even starting the project. Foxx I generally don't find as useful/interesting. I hope everyone who was "into" rethinkdb starts looking at ArangoDB now.
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