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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

351–360 of 457 posts

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#351
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If all the connections in the pool are taken, then the database wouldn't have been getting meaningful additional work done anyway, regardless of your scheme for accepting connections.

Having 100-1000x more active connections than you have cores on the box is worse than useless, it's actively detrimental.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#352
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

No, if I'm working at a company that has a blanket policy against using any (A)GPL software, then I can't use it. What the lawyers decide in a company that has 10k+ employees has nothing to do with the fears of anyone but the lawyers and the top management. Everyone else is just following the rules.

No, it's that your company is CHOOSING not to use it.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#353
I'm sad for this. I really liked rethinkdb and thought the potential for future development seemed really promising. They seemed to really know how to ship -- it's sad to imagine the momentum they had created fizzling out ... i would've liked to have seen what they would have came up with over the next couple of years ...

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#354

I recognize there's hundreds of different factors that played a role in the story of RethinkDB and its relatively poor adoption. I'd like to touch on one specific point (probably far from the most important one) - the name. I think you guys introduced friction very early on with some of the developers, because of your name. Given the context of our times where many of the devs joke around about "yet another 'revoluti…

You've got a good point here. Before actually using the product I thought the name was really gimmicky. Despite that, I had a fairly positive experience with RethinkDB. Their documentation was great and changefeeds were a great feature for what I was doing at the time.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#355

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…

Please dont make excuses for their failure. "Developer experience" and "performance" are never reasons for failure. What does lead to failure is - lack of mass adoption - they didnt solve a problem everyone had - lack of nitch adoption - they didnt solve a problem a few people had badly I can tell you 4 features that I view more important than change subscription - can run in any ecosystem - pouchdb/couchdb and water…

I strongly disagree. I think it failed because it failed to gain popularity for social reasons. It solved a lot of very important correctness problems. On the other hand MongoDB is successful despite having many serious problems. The initial versions were so bad that it had no right ever becoming popular.

Unfortunately, popularity doesn't imply merit and merit doesn't imply popularity.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#356
post #244

Per Crunchbase: Dec, 2013 $8M / Series A2 Sep, 2011 $3M / Series A Apr, 2010 $1.2M / Seed Jun, 2009 undisclosed amount / Seed Did the company have any revenue or was that the only money the company had to run on? 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…

Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think his cynicism is warranted. This is a forum, and one that is subject to trends and favorites. Anytime RethinkDB pops up on HN (or stripe for that matter) it seems to be met with unchecked praise. 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 a…

Could aways go for the Lisp Plea and say that the technology is so amazing that the hoi polloi simply can't fathom its amazingness.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#358
post #356
post #244

Per Crunchbase: Dec, 2013 $8M / Series A2 Sep, 2011 $3M / Series A Apr, 2010 $1.2M / Seed Jun, 2009 undisclosed amount / Seed Did the company have any revenue or was that the only money the company had to run on? 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…

Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years?

> Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years?

Not necessarily. It's possible they still have cash on hand but limited runway. Anything leftover would go back to investors.

That's assuming they never had any revenue. If they had money coming in, they could have spent that as well so the formula gets more complicated.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Rethink docs truly are incredible. Do you have any guides or books you recommend for writing good documentation? What software did you use to produce Rethink? Sorry to see Rethink go.

The documentation is all maintained in Markdown and built with Jekyll, so it's pretty straightforward. There were a few custom Jekyll tags. For writing, I used the venerable Mac editor BBEdit; obviously any text editor can do a fine job here, but there are some subtleties in BBEdit I liked. Its "open file by name" command can open multiple files with the same name at once, for instance, and its find/replace functiona…

Hahaha. That is surprising! Thanks for the helpful advice.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#360

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…

Please dont make excuses for their failure. "Developer experience" and "performance" are never reasons for failure. What does lead to failure is - lack of mass adoption - they didnt solve a problem everyone had - lack of nitch adoption - they didnt solve a problem a few people had badly I can tell you 4 features that I view more important than change subscription - can run in any ecosystem - pouchdb/couchdb and water…

Does RethinkDB not support transactions? I thought it did.
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