241–250 of 457 posts
Beautiful query language called AQL, and graphing support (multi-model) baked in.
Availability as a service was an issue, the compose deal did not work well for me, as my stuff was hosted on heroku.
Anyway, rethinkdb is probably the most awesome database I've tried.
Dec, 2013 $8M / Series A2
Sep, 2011 $3M / Series A
Apr, 2010 $1.2M / Seed
Jun, 2009 undisclosed amount / Seed
Assuming that info is correct, that's pretty slim for building a "hard tech" type of company. Building a database (from scratch no less) is a lot of up front work. Even after it's built you need to convince tech people to want to use it, convince their bosses to let them use it, and even then, hire sales people to sell support contracts.
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…
So in other words you're not going to continue to work on Horizon and Rethink, or at least if you do they are secondary priorities? Ugh.
Slava did the right thing; his first responsibility is to his employees, not his users, but this really sucks for us users.
For us, it would probably have been better to shut down abruptly. The community would have scrambled. Some employees would find work in companies that used RethinkDB, and maintenance would have continued the same way that Apache was developed ~20 years ago. Some would have grabbed support contracts from users. And some would have moved on.
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> 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.
E.g. I've worked on more than one startup where the first angel investment wasn't on the table before 6-12 months into development, and where that first round in some cases was below $250k
On top of that you also have the issue of finding someone that knows it, and the associated staffing risk that comes with that (yes, I'm sure you can always find someone, but at what price? there are place I can go where I couldn't throw a stone in any direction without hitting someone that "knows" Postgres or MySQL or both sufficiently well to be an acceptable tradeoff)
In many startups the tech choices end up being made not just based on what fits and what is affordable, but also based on what you can find affordable people to work with (including e.g. co-founders or other people willing to do initial work for equity) - sometimes that can lead to niche tech getting used. But far more often it means picking from a small set of the most common alternatives.
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I have always wondered why there isn't a tech company that just does kick ass documentation for companies. Seems like a small group of people who make kick butt stuff in this area. Really, you did have fantastic documentation, as the original said. Kudos.
There is a company, yc in fact http://readme.io/
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.