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RethinkDB is shutting down

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#331

Post by feklar »

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…

There's a lot of existing document-oriented databases like RethinkDB such as MongoDB, CouchDB, RavenDB, ect and they all have the same network bandwidth problem for geo-replication http://acmsocc.github.io/2015/posters/socc15posters-final52....

I guess those other document-oriented dbms just had better early stage shilling to get funding before RethinkDB did, and by the time Rethink shopped around there was already enough competitors that investments in documented-oriented dbms dried up.

The current state of the art is an in-memory dbms to take advantage of future available (soon, 2017) non-volatile memory. CMU is developing such a dbms http://pelotondb.org/ and there's also MemSql and Sap Hana.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#332

Post by desireco42 »

api wrote: post #328
nailer wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use RethinkDB at CertSimple. It's always been a great DB with safe defaults, excellent documentation and it's always just worked . Trickier ReQL queries are intuitive. It deserved wider support than what it got.

It's depressing that a half-baked constantly problematic effort like MongoDB wins while this gets neglected. Unfortunately we still live in a world where marketing beats merit.

:) You nailed it. I think MongoDB was interesting experiment and can be used, but RethinkDB shows you how it should be done right.

MySQL was for long time default choice over PgSQL, yet once developers matured, quality won. Just it took a decade :)

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#333

Post by st3v3r »

ithkuil wrote: post #222
orblivion wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"yeah. RethinkDB is AGPL, which means that some people cannot use it"

No, it means some people CHOOSE not to use it. There is nothing stopping them from deciding to use it, other than their own fears.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#334

Post by woliveirajr »

winter_blue wrote: post #316
tamalsaha001 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that RethinkDB has no commercial ambitions, will you consider re-licensing to more commercial friendly license?

It's licensed under the Affero GPLv3, but I don't think AGPL license requires you to open source your code, if you're just using ReQL (the API/interface for RethinkDB). GPL/AGPL requires you to share your code if you statically (or dynamically) link (which is a C language family concept) to GPL code, but I don't know if calling an API is considered "linking". I don't think most companies really make any contributions…

I've worked in a project that used some AGPL component. There were some many doubts on what should be open-sourced/which licenses were possible that we dropped that component and invested or time modification another one.

After some while, that component changed its licensing model. It was too late.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#335

Post by hodgesrm »

revo13 wrote: post #267
nodesocket wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patrick, I am curious why Stripe didn't just acquire RethinkDB completely? Seems like you could have gotten a bargain. Their investors get some money back, you'd get their excellent intellectual property, and finally the entire functioning RethinkDB team joins Stripe. Win-win right?

Coming from a failed startup myself, there is probably a bit of debt associated with the company at this point. In our final throws of life, we raised additional capital (angel/VC/etc) via convertible note to sustain the business a bit further. This in addition to back rent, unpaid bills, etc, leaves quite a pile of financial liability that any acquiring company would likely assume. Easier to let the company die and…

Asset transfers are common even in successful startups for the same reasons.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#336

Post by st3v3r »

simon_acca wrote: post #260

It seems that unfortunately RethinkDB the company was architected in such a way that the success of their product, in terms of performance and developer experience, led to a decrease in revenue. This shutdown therefore goes a long way to say how talented and ethically correct the team was, something extremely evident in how they put correctness and reliability in front of performance. In short, RethinkDB is a very so…

I dunno about that. Is it ethically correct to get people to work for a company who's prospects for remaining viable are not steady?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#337

Post by [deleted] »

zeveb wrote: post #311
pc86 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile," and hyperbole like this does much more harm than good to people like me who would like to see more open source and less proprietary software in the world simply as a matter of principle.

> Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile," Yes, it is: by definition it violates one of the Four Freedoms of users … which is hostile.

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#338

Post by st3v3r »

vidarh wrote: post #247
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.

Many early stage startups can't afford even a single salary. By the time enough cash is on the table to consider those kind of purchasing decisions, the initial round of architecture decisions have typically been made, and been cemented into the initial version of the software. 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…

So then the startup needs to get by with what it's got and earn money until they can afford it. Just like everyone else does with literally everything else.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#339

Post by wmfiv »

st3v3r wrote: post #336
simon_acca wrote: post #260

It seems that unfortunately RethinkDB the company was architected in such a way that the success of their product, in terms of performance and developer experience, led to a decrease in revenue. This shutdown therefore goes a long way to say how talented and ethically correct the team was, something extremely evident in how they put correctness and reliability in front of performance. In short, RethinkDB is a very so…

I dunno about that. Is it ethically correct to get people to work for a company who's prospects for remaining viable are not steady?

Absolutely it is. As long as you're transparent with your employees about the opportunity and the risks.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#340

Post by orthecreedence »

kod wrote: post #263
habitue wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big differences that RethinkDB has going for it is that its connections are based on coroutines, so it's really efficient to have thousands of open connections. Postgres uses one process per connection, so it's much harder to scale.

pgbouncer

How do you pgbounce a bunch of poller connections? pgbouncer has an event-based acceptor on the front, and a connection pool on the back. If all the connections in the pool are taken, then it will queue up the incoming connections until a backend connection is available. If all backend connections are long-polling, then incoming connections will just hang.
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