281–290 of 457 posts
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Sounds like it hasn't helped with consistency https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
No a storage engine change doesn't help with consistency. This is the JIRA tracking that Jepsen stale read issue: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17975
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If open source only works when you pay for it, it's just an abstraction layer around ordinary commercial software, with the same pressures. In fact, most of the people qualified to fix Linux video drivers are already employed full-time at a graphics card manufacturer (with its sales pressures) or a commercial redistributor (with its sales pressures). You could pay one of those companies for a support contract. But ot…
With ordinary proprietary software, there's only one team in the world you could possibly hire for maintenance, and if they're too busy or have a conflict of interest you're just screwed. Competition among maintainers should make them more efficient and scale better.
But that assumes there is a ready supply of people that can fix a certain part, and want to take contracting work. For example, let's say I have an ATI XYZ in my laptop. It has a driver bug and won't work. ATI driver is open source. Who do I hire to fix it?
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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…
The dearth of types can be good or bad depending on your use case. I agree that for some use cases it's a bad thing.
I like many things about SQL and still prefer it to RethinkDB in some ways, but there are no SQL databases that offer replication or HA fail over configurations that don't require incredible time investments to configure correctly. This includes commercial DBs as far as I can tell. If you're too small to have a DBA, HA SQL is out... unless you use a somewhat expensive and also restrictive cloud-managed solution. The latter would have been our second choice behind RethinkDB.
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Not sales. Marketing. In today's world having someone push a new database for a hefty price is not going to work. I would need to be able to test it against mongo and decide myself that it is better... but how would I know it's even an option?
Is there a firm line between sales and marketing these days? Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?
The next step is marketing. Unless your target market is so tiny you or your sales team can do a direct outreach.
Gaining users and customers is extremely difficult, often unpredictable and potentially expensive. While a bad product/technology/service can set you back there is no guarantee the best will get you success. Users can be unpredictable and the adoption curve for anything new is long.
Sometimes marketing is earlier in the market identification and product building stage so you know the market you are going after, gaps, segments and the value proposition to customers or users. This is product strategy. You can completely botch this step and expend effort on a product/service that is not clearly differentiated and has no market case.
B2C (business to consumer) marketing typically use large budgets to reach a wide potential customer base using traditional advertising channels, and now online and social channels. Even 'lucking' out with hype, viral marketing and rapid adoption requires someone or a team to fuel this hype.
B2B (business to business) marketing is more hands on and about building a predictable pipeline for your sales team to target and close. In some b2b business the sales cycle can be hugely long and expensive and the cost per lead and opportunity measured in thousands of dollars.
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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.
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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…
And yet here we are with a failed product. I think it's OK to ask why and consider its shortfallings. Obviously there was something, and I don't think it's fair to completely coast over the technology side of things and blame it on "marketing".
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Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
I can't describe how sad I am over this. RethinkDB is not just excellent db, but it is yardstick on how future db's should look like. What you accomplished there is excellent balance on features, great ui. We really need this project to go on, even if slower.
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As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product. On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/
Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!