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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#391

Post by the_common_man »

timmaxw wrote: post #378
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 custome…

Sorry, how is this possible? Lots of users. Lots of value. But no money? Makes no sense.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#392

Post by saurik »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #350
st3v3r wrote: 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.

This definition of "can't" means there is no such thing as "won't".

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#393

Post by saurik »

ithkuil wrote: post #313
zeveb wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RethinkDB is AGPL, which means that some people cannot use it That's completely false: anyone has the right to use it, for any purpose; that's what Freedom Zero is all about. Some people do not want to both use it and also comply with its terms, but that is their choice; they can and may use it, but choose not to.

TL;DR: it's not always "them", there are also those working for "them", who might have no say in the matter. cannot resist to reply to nitpicks :-) counterexample: let's imagine I'm an employee of a company which has a policy that forbids me from using any AGPL software for work and it also forbids to install said software on my corporate laptop at all (even if it was for personal evaluation or toy projects) or else,…

This is an extremely pedantic definition of "some people". As employees of the company doing work on their corporate laptop they can't do it, but that is because the company won't do it, and they are employees of the company.

Also: you shouldn't be using your company laptop for persona projects anyway... get your own laptop :/. So, likewise: "people who by premise are already doing something sketchy because they can't afford their own laptop and are pretending to borrow one under employment terms" is just an awkward place to start to define a reasonable, as opposed to pedantic, definition of "people".

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#394

Post by saurik »

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #317
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…

> what could have they done differently to stay afloat? Make a private (non-OSS) version optimized for Business (B2B), do external consultant jobs and pretty much ask for donations from the big players/users. This is a common problem from almost every OSS project and so far the only one that is doing this is OpenSSL.

What are your suggestions for this "optimized for business"?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#395

Post by dylz »

Just wanted to say good luck with everything to the team, and especially to neumino - you've personally helped me years ago on freenode writing some long ReQL queries when I first started experimenting with Rethink. :)

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#396

Post by tlogan »

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…

I can just speculate just as a user playing with RethinkDB (and having programing database SW from Tandem NonStop days) - for me, it seems like RethinkDB did not solve problem companies using databases and having money needs to be solved.

I think they needed to develop just one feature which cannot be done by Oracle and that is that.

The other problem could be that NoSQL hype just died out :(

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#397

Post by jnordwick »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #389
sedachv wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can definitely get around the currency issue by scaling yourself, but things like the timestamp issues (fractional seconds since the epoch with millisecond precision) are a little more problematic. You basically have to roll your own datetime format and lose any db support.

Databases are about data after all. Why not have a rich way to describe it?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#398

Post by erichocean »

roachpq wrote: post #315
erichocean wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> CockroachDB decided to be more-or-less Postgres-compatible on the wire, and embraced SQL. I was about to post that a quick grep of CockroachDB source turned up no references to postgres, libpq or anything obvious to back that up that claim but then I noticed my workspace was out of date, so I after a git pull/git grep I now see that you are correct. Commits to add postgres-compatible parsing and wire protocol appea…

They're also trying to make the information catalog compatible-ish as well, so that existing web-style frameworks that parse the information schema to determine datatypes and whatnot work out of the box.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#399

Post by habitue »

kod wrote: post #351
orthecreedence wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except it works just fine for RethinkDB because it was designed from the ground up to efficiently send changes from the shards directly to open connections. It's a design tradeoff postgres didn't make and they get other benefits rethinkdb doesn't have. But for this use case RethinkDB has a distinct architectural efficiency advantage

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#400

Post by SamReidHughes »

jnordwick wrote: post #397
SamReidHughes wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can definitely get around the currency issue by scaling yourself, but things like the timestamp issues (fractional seconds since the epoch with millisecond precision) are a little more problematic. You basically have to roll your own datetime format and lose any db support. Databases are about data after all. Why not have a rich way to describe it?

I think so too. But I don't think, say, not having a 32-bit integer type, and 16-bit and 8-bit integers, is a big problem, if you've got doubles. Maybe it's a nice-to-have. A 64 bit type or bigint would add real value.
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