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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#371

Post by pluma »

debaserab2 wrote: post #286
benjamincburns wrote: post #193

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…

> marketing

I think RethinkDB's marketing was excellent. The unchecked praise you mention is likely in no small part also a result of this.

However I don't think that means the technology was the problem. There are far more broken and misarchitected pieces of technology that are financially successful.

What exactly went wrong is speculative until we see the insights Slava promised, but it seems the failure was entirely financial: they had a great product, they brilliantly marketed it, but that didn't translate into sustainable revenue.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#372

Post by pluma »

the_common_man wrote: post #326

Looking at their website, they are being used be: * Nasa * Jive * wise.io, mediafly etc Just another confirmation that many of those companies list all these big well-known 'customers'.. except they are just lying. Maybe someone in nasa downloaded rethinkdb once and they just listed them there?

It doesn't have to be a lie. As far as I can tell they don't call them "customers" at any point, so they're most likely just "companies using RethinkDB".

They might even use RethinkDB extensively -- that doesn't mean RethinkDB makes any money from it. It's not lying, not even misleading. It's just not a metric that translates into "this company is making lots of money".

If you're a hugely successful open source project and every Fortune 500 company uses your tech that still doesn't mean you're financially viable unless those companies also give you enough money (e.g. for support and training, or proprietary licensing deals) to sustain yourself.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#373

Post by pluma »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #323
pluma wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the "Services" section. As far as I know they only offered commercial support and training. I'm not sure whether they also had a "dual licensing" model (i.e. allowing customers to give them money to get a copy of RethinkDB with a proprietary license instead of AGPL) but it's certainly not mentioned on the website.

hmm...dual licensing should really have been clearly advertized, together with corresponding commercial pricing. Most enterprise customers won't evaluate products that are on AGPL only, even for internal needs.

To be honest, I didn't realize it was AGPL until they shut down (though I have to admit I haven't used it in any real project and thus haven't really evaluated it too deeply).

My understanding would have been that AGPL means all code that interfaces with the database (i.e. all code that uses ReQL) must also be AGPL. That would have instantly disqualified RethinkDB for me (whether the understanding is right or not) and I'm sure I'm not the only one to think that way.

Considering even GPL-licensed software often prominently advertises commercial dual-licensing, this seems like a major oversight (if it wasn't for ideological reasons).

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#374

Post by pluma »

roel_v wrote: post #158
RangerScience wrote: post #147

To be clear: As part of shutting down, you guys found new jobs as you could for employees? That's rad!

For the engineers, it seems... Were there any other employees?

AIUI the designer who also did their illustrations left the company in the lead-up to this announcement? Other than that, I have no idea. Tech companies tend to not advertise their staff beyond developer roles much.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#375

Post by rer »

simon_acca wrote: post #363
rer wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does RethinkDB not support transactions? I thought it did.

"RethinkDB operations are never atomic across multiple keys. For this reason, RethinkDB cannot be considered an ACID database." source: https://rethinkdb.com/docs/consistency/ However, certain operations on a single key, like incrementing a counter, are atomic.

I wish they had added transactions. It seems like such an important feature.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#376

Post by pluma »

rodrickbrown wrote: post #90
programminggeek wrote: post #32

What was RethinkDB's business model and why didn't it work?

Trying to sell opensource software with great documentation.

*Trying to sell training and support for opensource software with great documentation and few bugs.

At least that's what the website indicates.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#377

Post by timmaxw »

pluma wrote: post #373
sheeshkebab wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm...dual licensing should really have been clearly advertized, together with corresponding commercial pricing. Most enterprise customers won't evaluate products that are on AGPL only, even for internal needs.

To be honest, I didn't realize it was AGPL until they shut down (though I have to admit I haven't used it in any real project and thus haven't really evaluated it too deeply). My understanding would have been that AGPL means all code that interfaces with the database (i.e. all code that uses ReQL) must also be AGPL. That would have instantly disqualified RethinkDB for me (whether the understanding is right or not) an…

> My understanding would have been that AGPL means all code that interfaces with the database (i.e. all code that uses ReQL) must also be AGPL.

The client drivers are licensed separately under the Apache license. Only the database server itself is AGPL. Read the last question on the rethinkdb.com FAQ: https://rethinkdb.com/faq/

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#378

Post by timmaxw »

the_common_man wrote: post #326

Looking at their website, they are being used be: * Nasa * Jive * wise.io, mediafly etc Just another confirmation that many of those companies list all these big well-known 'customers'.. except they are just lying. Maybe someone in nasa downloaded rethinkdb once and they just listed them there?

If you'd scrolled another 10cm down the page, you would have seen the testimonial from NASA:

> At NASA, RethinkDB is radically simplifying how we provide real-time services in support of Extra-Vehicular Activity. -- Collin Estes, Director of Software Engineering, Chief Architect - MRI Technologies Inc. - NASA / ESOC

My guess is that RethinkDB failed financially because they had a lot of users but not a lot of customers. Most users weren't buying support contracts.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#379

Post by fweespeech »

rer wrote: post #375
simon_acca wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"RethinkDB operations are never atomic across multiple keys. For this reason, RethinkDB cannot be considered an ACID database." source: https://rethinkdb.com/docs/consistency/ However, certain operations on a single key, like incrementing a counter, are atomic.

I wish they had added transactions. It seems like such an important feature.

ACID correct distributed transactions create very, very painful performance problem because you have to lock across multiple physical machines separated by network connection(s).

Or y'know, you just don't do them correctly and accept a substantial rate of quietly corrupted data.

There isn't really a good option unless you have absurd amounts of money compared to your transaction volume.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#380

Post by fweespeech »

jnordwick wrote: post #160
jkarneges wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - bad performance

What scenarios were you finding you had bad performance?

I was finding I could getting comparable performance to MySQL for straight by key CRUD activity which is all I'd use a document store for (particularly once you take into account MySQL replicating to multiple nodes and the related failover setup).

> This is with about 20 minutes of looking around and just listing a few things. It looks like RethinkDB was written by web devs for web devs and I don't think that can compete in the database world. You might get the web devs onboard, but the database and HPC people at the firm will probably look at it and go "how quaint when can we get Oracle/Postgres/Informix/etc up and running?"

Have you ever tried to fully automate the failover/replication/etc for those? It is a substantial pain point that usually requires an experienced DB person with that database to do it well.

There are plenty of CRUD datasets where RethinkDB would be good enough and wouldn't require the dedicated ops people. That is the pain point I'd say RethinkDB was focused on solving.

----

I'd say the real reason of the failure is more the business model end where the intersection of orgs w/o dedicated ops people AND willing to pay for support was simply too small. RethinkDB was built (imo) for small organizations that simply didn't have a dedicated ops team and it was just 5-10 developers + marketing/business.

That could just be how I feel because its the situation I'm in (less than 10 IT supporting 200+ person org and our sysadmins deal almost entirely with end user issues).

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