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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#81

Post by hueving »

jgord wrote: post #41

I just want to personally thank Slava for his exceptional work over the past few years - at every step him and his team have been classy and professional, and brought real creativity and intelligence to the world of databases and startups. Its clear to me that Rethink is the model for future databases - its just that DBs have a long gestation as no-one wants to risk their data until the code is aged like a fine wine.…

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 support.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#82

Post by [deleted] »

vacri wrote: post #77
omginternets wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because having the better product (often) doesn't matter: see Windows vs Apple in the early days. Mongo has a strong community, which translates into a plethora of articles/blog-posts/tutorials/etc that secures its niche. From there it's possible to make money with things like consulting fees to help fix the problems it created in the first place. It's all about execution. Case and point: I know what (purportedly) ma…

At my last workplace, I finally asked: "Since you guys bitch about mongo so much, why do we use it? Why not something else?". Response: "It's not actually that bad, it does the job". Half the crap people speak about Mongo seems to be from either the early days, or from people who just like to complain. It certainly has it's issues, but there doesn't seem to be much community will to replace it with $superdupernosqldb…

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#83

Post by bcruddy »

scrollaway wrote: post #53
statictype wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works the opposite way too. If a project is open source then who is committed to helping you support and maintain it? You essentially need to have a team to do it. If there's a company behind it, it gives you assurances. Especially for a small company that needs to focus on building a product rather than committing features and bug fixes to their database

You can have an open source product with a company behind it, they're not incompatible.

Red Hat's market cap is almost $15B and they're worth $2B. Definitely not incompatible.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#84

Post by misterbowfinger »

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 sales as well? Not sure.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#85

Post by toomuchtodo »

threeseed wrote: post #70
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay...but if Rethink couldn't make their business self-sustaining, why would Mongo when there are a plethora of other open source databases/datastores that can do Mongo's job better than Mongo? EDIT: We'll just wait for Mongo to burn through all their cash then.

MongoDB is killing it in the Big Data space right now with excellent integrations with Spark and Hadoop, strong relationships with Hortonworks and Cloudera and really good enterprise support. I know many Fortune 500 companies and equivalents overseas who are customers. But please enlighten us poor fools which open source databases can compete with MongoDB in this space. It sure as hell isn't PostgreSQL.

But are people paying for it if MongoDB is "killing it". If not, no business model.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#86

Post by VeXocide »

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 fully expect a write-up on why RethinkDB failed in the coming months, we're going to have to deal with the practical consequences first.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#87

Post by geofft »

dcwca wrote: post #45
brianwawok wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in the world can work on a large DB, even with source? I am all for open source, but it doesn't make things like this is easy as some make it out to be. For example with Linux source, how long would it take me to fix a video driver bug? Perhaps a year?

I hope it wouldn't take you a year to hire someone qualified to fix it for you.

If open source only works when you pay for it, it's just an abstraction layer around ordinary commercial software, with the same pressures. In fact, most of the people qualified to fix Linux video drivers are already employed full-time at a graphics card manufacturer (with its sales pressures) or a commercial redistributor (with its sales pressures). You could pay one of those companies for a support contract. But other than that, if someone else qualified exists, it's only worth their time to take these contracts if there's enough sustainable business to keep up-to-date with how Linux graphics drivers work; chances are there isn't, and they're spending their time in full-time employment doing something else entirely. So, you're at the same place where you started: the problem is complicated enough that there aren't enough reliable sales, and so it only gets done by large companies that can afford to fund the work because they already have enough sales of enough things.

(Full disclosure: I am one of the people who could have been qualified; one of the jobs I was considering a few years back was a graphics-driver-hacker position at Red Hat. I happened to instead choose full-time employment doing various, mostly userspace Linux stuff for a startup. When they ended their incredible journey, I would have loved to make a living taking contracts like the ones you suggest - and I still wish I could - but there aren't enough of them and they aren't reliable enough to make it better than just taking a full-time job with a profitable company.)

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#88

Post by hueving »

geofft wrote: post #63
nine_k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever thought what do these salespeople do in a software company? This is what happens when salespeople fail to do enough of their thing. Sales are essential for a for-profit company.

So, maybe we should find a way to develop good technology that doesn't involve for-profit companies?

Non profit companies still need to make money to keep the lights on. That means targeting technologies that can attract lots of donations. Databases are a very mature technology so the number of companies running into issues with them is vanishingly small. Who is going to donate to a non profit spending its time developing a solution a problem almost nobody has?

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#89

Post by threeseed »

guessmyname wrote: post #43
joneholland wrote: post #3

A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.

I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries…

MongoDB is very popular in the Big Data and IOT spaces.

In most enterprises around 2/3 of the data in the lake is unstructured and comes from multiple systems we don't control or have visibility into. So it just gets dumped into HDFS until someone creates the relevant HCatalog schemas. Having a database like MongoDB at least allows you to extract and access some of the data in an automated fashion e.g. JSON reflection. It's especially useful for adhoc and lightweight model scoring and feature engineering.

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