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RethinkDB is shutting down

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#381

Post by williamstein »

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…

I agree that people will have exactly your concerns (despite that the drivers are apache). If Slava re-releases everything under the Apache license, I think that the chances of RethinkDB having a future are much greater. Considering a relicense is issue number 2 here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fy-drBGDTyibwEBBAX6G5otq...

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#382

Post by pluma »

timmaxw wrote: post #377
pluma wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Oh, absolutely. That is why I said "intuition". It doesn't matter what the license actually means. It only matters that it's a huge red flag that may prevent people from investigating further.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#383

Post by misterbowfinger »

hodgesrm wrote: post #369
misterbowfinger wrote: post #84

Wow. I was seriously rooting for them. I'm looking forward to Slava's posts about their challenges on the business side. There's a part of me that's angry that MongoDB - which some would say has made an objectively worse product - has succeeded. My initial thought is that MongoDB has done a way, way better job at SEO. The number of blog posts about RethinkDB pales in comparison to Mongo. I wonder if they got beat on…

MongoDB has received a huge amount of venture funding: $311M vs $12.2M for RethinkDB. That makes a big difference how far you can grow as a business if you use the money even half-way rationally. Given that the market for document DBMS is pretty small to begin with it's tough to beat a 25x difference in budget unless you have a product that is a complete game-changer. It will be interesting to see Slava's analysis. M…

I originally thought funding would play a big role, but the early, 2-3 year period of funding for both is comparable:

RethinkDB, 2009-11 = $4.2MM

MongoDB, 2008-2009 = $4.9MM

It's true that MongoDB quickly closed on a $6.5MM Series C in Dec of 2010, one year after their Series B. For Rethink, it took them another 2 years to get the last $8MM. There's no question that MongoDB was "better" at raising more money, faster.

I'm just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if MongoDB made a conscious tradeoff to sacrifice good tech to have better marketing & sales early on.

Crunchbase links here:

- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mongodb-inc/funding-...

- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rethinkdb/funding-ro...

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#384

Post by formula1 »

tensor wrote: post #355
formula1 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im not saying it needed any of these features but I view these features more important than what rethink had to offer. What rethink did offer was redis + new query lang + persistance. I dont think popularity was the issue

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#385

Post by misterbowfinger »

sotojuan wrote: post #94
misterbowfinger wrote: post #84

Wow. I was seriously rooting for them. I'm looking forward to Slava's posts about their challenges on the business side. There's a part of me that's angry that MongoDB - which some would say has made an objectively worse product - has succeeded. My initial thought is that MongoDB has done a way, way better job at SEO. The number of blog posts about RethinkDB pales in comparison to Mongo. I wonder if they got beat on…

Mongo also got there "first". I mean, Mongo isn't much compared to Rethink, but they're both in the "not a traditional SQL database" camp and Mongo came before and had all the hype first. I wouldn't be surprised if people a) didn't use Rethink because they're happy with Mongo and its popularity b) hated Mongo and saw Rethink as too similar/didn't research it enough.

My sense is that the market for NoSQL databases is large enough that RethinkDB could have focused on a particular customer segment and grown from there. So even if Mongo was the dominant player in NoSQL land, it seems at least possible that Rethink could stick it out and win.

Perhaps this is what RethinkDB's strategy was all along with targeting real-time applications. I wonder if they were just... too early?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#386

Post by sedachv »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #367
ScottBurson wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This anti-pattern -- floats as the sole numeric type -- goes all the way back to BASIC in 1964. It's just as bad an idea now as it was then.

The only concrete problem anybody's mentioned with floats is that they only have 53 bits of precision, and some people need their integers to go up to 64 bits, or more.

What are you going to do for currency amounts if you do not have ints ? Strings with numbers in them?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#387

Post by tshannon »

erichocean wrote: post #108
hueving wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can chalk this up to a failure of capitalism. Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. People like to hate on mysql/mariadb, but it also has a massive open source community. As a company choosing open source technologies, the popularity is important . Otherwise you run into issues finding answers to common problems and you end up paying through the nose for suppor…

> Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. Presumably, that's in part why CockroachDB decided to be more-or-less Postgres-compatible on the wire, and embraced SQL.

I'm really excited to see where cockroachDB is headed.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#388

Post by simon_acca »

formula1 wrote: post #384
tensor wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im not saying it needed any of these features but I view these features more important than what rethink had to offer. What rethink did offer was redis + new query lang + persistance. I dont think popularity was the issue

I think a very important "selling" point that is not emphatized enough is how it addresses upfront with intellectual honesty in the "architecture" section of the docs[0] many important questions that other databases sometimes hide away to sweeten the deal, that is:

  * How does it position itself against the CAP theorem?
  * Will it ever lose my data during normal operation? (i.e. what are the consistency guarantees)
  * What happens when 1...N nodes go down?
  * What are the requirements for a well performing cluster?
  * What are the limitations in terms of document size, number of documents, ecc?
The point I'm trying to make is that after reading that document, one can quickly and completely understand if RethinkDB suits one needs or not, without "surprises" down the road.

0: https://rethinkdb.com/docs/architecture/

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#389

Post by SamReidHughes »

sedachv wrote: post #386
SamReidHughes wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only concrete problem anybody's mentioned with floats is that they only have 53 bits of precision, and some people need their integers to go up to 64 bits, or more.

What are you going to do for currency amounts if you do not have ints ? Strings with numbers in them?

Floating point numbers handle integer values in the range -2^53..2^53 just fine.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#390

Post by tlarkworthy »

habitue wrote: post #273
kabes wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly interested: how do you know Firebase works that way and do you have any links to more info about how Firebase works?

I talked with them a while back. It's possible now that they're at Google they've changed their back end to work without mongo or whatever, but at least pre-google, that's my understanding.

no, notifications have never worked through oplog watching. It's a custom application layer infront of persistence that sends the mutation transition to registered parties. The oplog is too coarse grained.
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