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…
RethinkDB is shutting down
431–440 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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"?
1) An Stable "enterprise grade" version which receives fixes and minor performance updates for at least 5 years, maybe even charge extra for another 2-5 years round (just like Microsoft does).
2) Reports: Business love reports, if they add a way to generate reports straight from the DB (like Oracle and SQL Server) is a killer feature most of the time.
3) Customer Support.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loving a product is somewhat orthogonal. To be successful an open source DB company needs some large customers paying to make that model work. I dislike cassandra immensely, but I still use it every day.
> I dislike cassandra immensely, but I still use it every day. I feel your pain. There is very few robust database system that handle recovery well enough at scale, and for those without the deep pocket to keep a dba on hand there are very little choices. For small/middle scale robust system Cockroach db is promising but still needs a couple years development, if it can survive without a monetization strategy long en…
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cant-run-100-node-cockroa...
Cassandra is at least the devil I know, although it seems to find a new way to fail me every six months or so.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
Such a passionate developer however might find himself in a situation where she's not allowed to use some tool X because of a restriction put up by his employer.
That restriction might be a minor annoyance, e.g. raise the barrier to entry because "doh, I need to go and grab my personal laptop for that? nah, let me use something else". Or it might be a deal breaker: I need to get some job done, I'd like to play with tool Y, use it to get the job done and learn new thins while doing it.
This kind of people, those passionate developers, will complain about that.
They will complain to their employee for putting up such a restriction (and you'll usually not hear about those complains here).
But they will also complain about why the tool Y has chosen a license that his employer find so problematic.
These people will not just stop complaining just because they shouldn't be wanting to play with things in the first place. That's what they do, and that's often why they are good at doing things.
People do complain when they have too many rules that hinder their ability to do stuff effectively. I do see that happening, quite a lot; and I can understand why and relate to it.
Do they have the right to complain? Well, that's another story.
If the tool is closed source and they don't want to buy a license, then sure they can complain but they will just shrug it off as "that's the way it is" and move on.
I believe that things start to be more blurred when you have an open-source tool, which suddenly you cannot use (I'm not saying extend and sell commercially as closed source!) just because of FUD around licensing.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#436Earlier 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.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#437Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
datetimes, aggregations, etc. pretty much anything non-toy in the modern world requires 64 bit int. like I said. read NEED as in you can certainly hobble around without it (pick an appropriate offset and read your 53 bits in relation to it), but like a fracture in a leg, it's still considered broken.
What exactly do you mean by aggregations here? If you want a good timestamp you probably want a timespec, and that won't fit in 64 bits anyway. I don't see why it's easy to make 128+ bit types be composite, but you can't have 64 bit types be composite. Your database driver can take care of how the bits are packed on the wire. It really shouldn't be a big concern.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you NEED a 64 bit int? Why not 32 bit? You're not storing pointers in a database. (And then you can implement your 32 bit int in terms of the 53 bits of int-capacity in a double.)
Because I want to store something that is a 64bit int? I mean this is really a weird question. There are a lot of things that require this starting with timestamps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
64 bit is nicer than 32 bit, but it's scarcely more necessary than 128 bit numbers.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
please do introduce me to your generous VC. At current low interest rates, building a stack that is reliant on KDB, will cause a large valuation hit because you're effectively locked into a negative -250k/year cashflow in perpetuity. At a 5% discount rate for example that's more than 5m USD of inflexible negative NPV right up front. Look there are fintech applications where this will be seen as fine (right tool for t…
You're right. I did not think this through.
Startups are hard (Ive failed a couple times and had it work a couple times - definitely not always through my own effort).
My current view on this is that RethikDB didn't rethink enough They solved a probabem without much money involved and too small. They might be great devs, but just diidn't solve a prolblem that needed to be solved.