15 ms·

Are RethinkDB and Horizon abandoned?

292 points by jamon51 10y ago

ddorian43 10y ago
Well, at least it's open source, right guys ?
- williamstein 10y ago
  Yes and the source (that I've looked at) is high quality. That said, it's a very complicated program with no room for mistakes, and it is written in C++ so plenty of opportunities for memory/pointer issues. RethinkDB is very stable these days, unlike a year ago, and I think it could work well as a full open source project at this point (given the good code quality and docs). Absolutely critical to that would be relicensing everything under a much more liberal license than AGPL!!
lukeholder 10y ago
Oh no! Hope everything ends up OK. RethinkDB is so fun to use. Would it be normal for development to slow when an acquisition is happening?
- mpk 10y ago
  Yes, that would be normal. During an acquisition the future is unknown so you don't have a reliable roadmap you can use to set or update development goals. Other activities that take away from development could be developers working on capability demonstration or participating in technical due diligence. (I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking generally here)
benjaminwootton 10y ago
And people wonder why enterprises are risk averse and nervous of open source and new innovations from startups. Are there any circumstances where a company can reasonably go dark for a week? If it is an acquisition it's pretty disrepectful of people investing in their solution.
- wingless 10y ago
  On the contrary, I would say that enterprises should take the risk and use such projects. They likely have enough capital to hire the correct people (e.g. one of the core devs) when a problem shows up. Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
  - bnastic 10y ago
    That's not how enterprises work.
    - moreentropy 10y ago
      Ack. Sadly, enterprise procurement is all about avoiding blame in case something goes wrong. Another issue is contributing to open source projects. I know a case where a customer's in house developer had to wait two months to contribute a few lines patch to a open source project because legal objected. They never dealt with that situation before.
      - nikanj 10y ago
        Enterprise procurement is all about avoiding things going wrong, avoiding blame is a distant second. When every hour of downtime costs hundreds of thousands, the ridiculously expensive, 24/7 SLA supported enterprise solutions don't seem so overpriced anymore.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      That's how at least one of my start-up experiences wound up. The large enterprise entity who'd committed strongly to the product ended up bringing much of the development effort in-house, for several years. You've got to realise that for enterprise software, there's $10 sales, $100 sales, $1,000 sales ... and then $1,000,000 sales. At the top level, you're looking at entities who have the resources, and occasionally the motivation, to bring product entirely in-house. It might not be their first choice, but it's an option, and quite likely something they've already considered when negotiating for services.
diegorbaquero 10y ago
I'd be pretty sad if they abandon it. I have used and use it in many projects.
mrsteveman1 10y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682
saintfiends 10y ago
Shit! We just started using RethinkDB. This is pretty scary.
- BafS 10y ago
  We made the choice to use RethinkDB with my team exactly 1 hour ago, crazy.
  - kaiyes 10y ago
    cmon. thats just.....I don't know what to say
- disordinary 10y ago
  Plenty of products are built on Cassandra despite not having a commercial entity behind it, same with HBase, Postgres, Couch, etc.
gotofritz 10y ago
There was another discussion on this, but it's dead for some reason... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 TL;DR a lot of people think there's a secrete acquisition going on and they are doing code evaluation
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
craigyk 10y ago
Pick two: 1. Valuable product maintained by professionals 2. Is free 3. Will be around for a long time Yes, I know there are exceptions.
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  Huh. Apache, nginx, php, js, python, Linux, chromium, asterisk, openvpn... list is very very long. Actually I doubt there is more proprietary software that is widely accepted and reliable, than open-source (or even free) software with same achievements.
  - regularfry 10y ago
    "Valuable product maintained by professionals" doesn't equal "proprietary". All those products you list have people paid to work on them. Open Source doesn't work in the long term without sponsorship of some sort.
    - EugeneOZ 10y ago
      You want to say these products are not valuable or not maintaned by professionals? They are making money around their projects same as RethinkDB did, so I don't understand what difference you want to underline.
    - disordinary 10y ago
      Plenty of software companies build their businesses around opensource software and pay their employees well. The list is endless
coffeemug 10y ago
Slava @ RethinkDB here. I am not able to get into details yet, but the short version is that the commercial entity behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We're working on continuity for the open-source project. Full announcement (and details) coming in a day or two.
- chanux 10y ago
  Really liked the work done in RethinkDB. Hope it stays!
- bcantrill 10y ago
  Dammit -- so sorry to hear that. :( As you know, I am a huge fan of RethinkDB, and I certainly know the challenges of building an open source based business. You guys succeeded wildly at building excellent software that will endure -- and I for one will be sporting one of my beloved RethinkDB shirts tomorrow...
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Slava, Michael and the RethinkDB team, Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire. I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project. [1] - https://thinky.io/documentation/ https://thinky.io/documentation/
- patates 10y ago
  I just love what you created, and really hope that it just keeps getting better. I was discussing with my team to switch to RethinkDB on some services just this Monday. Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
- 5ersi 10y ago
pas 10y ago
"Slava @ Rethink here. Unfortunately I cannot comment yet (I really wish I could), but your intuition is right. We're working hard to be able to give a full account ASAP (matter of days). Please stay tuned." https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-abandoned/619/7 https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-ab... That doesn't sound promising :/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
thejosh 10y ago
Really why popular opensource from companies controlled by that company is a bad idea if noone is really interested in carrying it forward. How many frameworks/languages/tools would survive if their parent company disappeared? I know IO.js was successful when diverging from nodejs (even if they ended up merging again).
jakebasile 10y ago
I had just been evaluating Horizon for a new project using React. It looked very promising but we decided to use Firebase instead, in spite of Firebase being closed source and subject to vendor lock in. We simply couldn't justify forgoing the built in deployment and additional features of Firebase when we are on such a tight time and money budget. I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.
Ros2 10y ago
RethinkDB kicked (at least) 2 people from their Github organization involved in Horizon development. This tells me they plan to continue the organization in some way--probably under another company and not with Horizon at all. Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the community. It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this pretty closely.
- buskila 10y ago
  So what are you saying?
hoodoof 10y ago
This is the sort of thing that needs to live in a bigger company that wants a quality database product to round out its product offering.
jondubois 10y ago
I hope that RethinkDB (the company) gets acquired. I think the main hurdle for them is that their product is open source. Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable; the source code or everything else?
barrkel 10y ago
Why has this been marked dupe? What is it a dupe of - I don't see any other story on the front page about this?
- Artemis2 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682
jondubois 10y ago
I think now is not a good time for open source. There is just too much advertising in the tech industry. The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open source is a low-margin, high volume industry. These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need to become profitable. On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are just spamming the internet with their ads.
eis 10y ago
This thread seems actively being burried by HN. Now it's flagged as dupe and the previous thread from yesterday also quickly disappeared from the front page after gaining traction. Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far. HN mods: what happened here?
- nathancahill 10y ago
  The previous discussion was buried too. I'd also like to know why a link with +250 points is modded away. Obviously they are trying to keep it on the dl, but we really need some transparency when HN the news site conflicts with YC the fund. Edit: Here's a semi-buried sctb response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225
stemuk 10y ago
This discussion has no duplicate, so why is it marked as dupe??
PaulCapestany 10y ago
Don't want to be accused of being a shill (I'm not, I'm just a fan), but if you're looking for potential alternatives to RethinkDB, Couchbase (the company that was formed when the MemcacheD and CouchDB folks joined forces) offer a totally open source realtime-sync API/SDK (cross-platform: mobile, web, you name it). Link: http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile
- robertjpayne 10y ago
  Couchbase is a very very different product under the hood. Be aware you have to run Couchbase with their minimum spec cluster requirements ( 3 nodes, tons of CPU and RAM ) just to ensure you don't lose data because it syncs from ram to disk at best every 100ms
  - HodGreeley 10y ago
    Hod @ Couchbase here. This is inaccurate. Couchbase does not delay in writing to disk (some other dbs do). You typically want 3 nodes for high availability and failover, but it isn't required. Auto replication can also help avoid loss in many failure scenarios.
    - robertjpayne 10y ago
      I'd actually love to be proven wrong, Couchbase looks awesome on paper but some Couchbase staff even confirmed this with me here https://forums.couchbase.com/t/persistence-durability-guarentees/9860/7 https://forums.couchbase.com/t/persistence-durability-guaren...
      - HodGreeley 10y ago
        This is complicated, because you're intertwining Sync Gateway and Couchbase Server. Couchbase Server queues writes immediately. The default is to ack once a write is in Server memory, but you can choose other options. See the response from daschl in that thread. I see what you were trying to get at with your question. I'm not sure we clarified enough what's going on. I'll respond on the forum.
tleyden5iwx 10y ago
It looks like RethinkDB is relying solely on revenue from training and support. Is that even feasible for a product like theirs? I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database with-scaling-issues} cluster. But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has: * Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training) * Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support) Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection. I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep RethinkDB alive? Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not working for them?
- williamstein 10y ago
  They were trying to pivot to at least two additional revenue models during he last year, but it seems to have simply took too long (1. Custom closed code for enterprise customers, 2. Hosted Horizon). I have paid RethinkDB for support by the way, just to support them.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- istinspring 10y ago
  RethinkDB is not perfect there is tons of issues. For example it useing too much memory for the large volumes of data and then performance tends to degrade.
nutanc 10y ago
IBM's compose supports rethinkDB. Will they continue to support?
shobhitverma 10y ago
RethinkDB was closest thing I knew to SecDB. I used to love SecDB when I was using it. http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sachss-most-valued-trading-weapon-1473242401 http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sach...
tshannon 10y ago
So what alternatives are there to Rethink? Not excited about Mongo. Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?
bbulkow 10y ago
Founder of a (non YC) database company here. Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do. The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail. Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size. Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.
frankleng 10y ago
perhaps https://www.pipelinedb.com/ https://www.pipelinedb.com/ can be an alternative as well. It's not that we are super set on using RethinkDB, but love ReQL! Going back to SQL just seems a huge step back at this point.
lvca 10y ago
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of OrientDB (http://orientdb.com http://orientdb.com), another reactive database. It looks like the RethinkDB project will be alive if it will be maintained by the community or if it could find another sponsor. But if you are looking for an alternative take a look at OrientDB Live Query feature: http://orientdb.com/livequery/ http://orientdb.com/livequery/. It doesn't cover 100% what RethinkDB provides, but it's something very close. The OrientDB's license is Apache 2 (so FREE for any usage) and a commercial 24x7 support is available on request.

292 points by jamon51 10y ago

ddorian43 10y ago

Well, at least it's open source, right guys ?

williamstein 10y ago
Yes and the source (that I've looked at) is high quality. That said, it's a very complicated program with no room for mistakes, and it is written in C++ so plenty of opportunities for memory/pointer issues. RethinkDB is very stable these days, unlike a year ago, and I think it could work well as a full open source project at this point (given the good code quality and docs). Absolutely critical to that would be relicensing everything under a much more liberal license than AGPL!!

lukeholder 10y ago

Oh no! Hope everything ends up OK. RethinkDB is so fun to use. Would it be normal for development to slow when an acquisition is happening?

mpk 10y ago
Yes, that would be normal. During an acquisition the future is unknown so you don't have a reliable roadmap you can use to set or update development goals. Other activities that take away from development could be developers working on capability demonstration or participating in technical due diligence. (I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking generally here)

benjaminwootton 10y ago

And people wonder why enterprises are risk averse and nervous of open source and new innovations from startups. Are there any circumstances where a company can reasonably go dark for a week? If it is an acquisition it's pretty disrepectful of people investing in their solution.

wingless 10y ago
On the contrary, I would say that enterprises should take the risk and use such projects. They likely have enough capital to hire the correct people (e.g. one of the core devs) when a problem shows up. Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
- bnastic 10y ago
  That's not how enterprises work.
  - moreentropy 10y ago
    Ack. Sadly, enterprise procurement is all about avoiding blame in case something goes wrong. Another issue is contributing to open source projects. I know a case where a customer's in house developer had to wait two months to contribute a few lines patch to a open source project because legal objected. They never dealt with that situation before.
    - nikanj 10y ago
      Enterprise procurement is all about avoiding things going wrong, avoiding blame is a distant second. When every hour of downtime costs hundreds of thousands, the ridiculously expensive, 24/7 SLA supported enterprise solutions don't seem so overpriced anymore.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    That's how at least one of my start-up experiences wound up. The large enterprise entity who'd committed strongly to the product ended up bringing much of the development effort in-house, for several years. You've got to realise that for enterprise software, there's $10 sales, $100 sales, $1,000 sales ... and then $1,000,000 sales. At the top level, you're looking at entities who have the resources, and occasionally the motivation, to bring product entirely in-house. It might not be their first choice, but it's an option, and quite likely something they've already considered when negotiating for services.

diegorbaquero 10y ago

I'd be pretty sad if they abandon it. I have used and use it in many projects.

mrsteveman1 10y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682

saintfiends 10y ago

Shit! We just started using RethinkDB. This is pretty scary.

BafS 10y ago
We made the choice to use RethinkDB with my team exactly 1 hour ago, crazy.
- kaiyes 10y ago
  cmon. thats just.....I don't know what to say
disordinary 10y ago
Plenty of products are built on Cassandra despite not having a commercial entity behind it, same with HBase, Postgres, Couch, etc.

gotofritz 10y ago

There was another discussion on this, but it's dead for some reason... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 TL;DR a lot of people think there's a secrete acquisition going on and they are doing code evaluation

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

craigyk 10y ago

Pick two: 1. Valuable product maintained by professionals 2. Is free 3. Will be around for a long time Yes, I know there are exceptions.

EugeneOZ 10y ago
Huh. Apache, nginx, php, js, python, Linux, chromium, asterisk, openvpn... list is very very long. Actually I doubt there is more proprietary software that is widely accepted and reliable, than open-source (or even free) software with same achievements.
- regularfry 10y ago
  "Valuable product maintained by professionals" doesn't equal "proprietary". All those products you list have people paid to work on them. Open Source doesn't work in the long term without sponsorship of some sort.
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    You want to say these products are not valuable or not maintaned by professionals? They are making money around their projects same as RethinkDB did, so I don't understand what difference you want to underline.
  - disordinary 10y ago
    Plenty of software companies build their businesses around opensource software and pay their employees well. The list is endless

coffeemug 10y ago

Slava @ RethinkDB here. I am not able to get into details yet, but the short version is that the commercial entity behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We're working on continuity for the open-source project. Full announcement (and details) coming in a day or two.

chanux 10y ago
Really liked the work done in RethinkDB. Hope it stays!
bcantrill 10y ago
Dammit -- so sorry to hear that. :( As you know, I am a huge fan of RethinkDB, and I certainly know the challenges of building an open source based business. You guys succeeded wildly at building excellent software that will endure -- and I for one will be sporting one of my beloved RethinkDB shirts tomorrow...
nodesocket 10y ago
Slava, Michael and the RethinkDB team, Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire. I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project. [1] - https://thinky.io/documentation/ https://thinky.io/documentation/
patates 10y ago
I just love what you created, and really hope that it just keeps getting better. I was discussing with my team to switch to RethinkDB on some services just this Monday. Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
5ersi 10y ago

pas 10y ago

"Slava @ Rethink here. Unfortunately I cannot comment yet (I really wish I could), but your intuition is right. We're working hard to be able to give a full account ASAP (matter of days). Please stay tuned." https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-abandoned/619/7 https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-ab... That doesn't sound promising :/

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

thejosh 10y ago

Really why popular opensource from companies controlled by that company is a bad idea if noone is really interested in carrying it forward. How many frameworks/languages/tools would survive if their parent company disappeared? I know IO.js was successful when diverging from nodejs (even if they ended up merging again).

jakebasile 10y ago

I had just been evaluating Horizon for a new project using React. It looked very promising but we decided to use Firebase instead, in spite of Firebase being closed source and subject to vendor lock in. We simply couldn't justify forgoing the built in deployment and additional features of Firebase when we are on such a tight time and money budget. I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.

Ros2 10y ago

RethinkDB kicked (at least) 2 people from their Github organization involved in Horizon development. This tells me they plan to continue the organization in some way--probably under another company and not with Horizon at all. Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the community. It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this pretty closely.

buskila 10y ago
So what are you saying?

hoodoof 10y ago

This is the sort of thing that needs to live in a bigger company that wants a quality database product to round out its product offering.

jondubois 10y ago

I hope that RethinkDB (the company) gets acquired. I think the main hurdle for them is that their product is open source. Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable; the source code or everything else?

barrkel 10y ago

Why has this been marked dupe? What is it a dupe of - I don't see any other story on the front page about this?

Artemis2 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682

jondubois 10y ago

I think now is not a good time for open source. There is just too much advertising in the tech industry. The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open source is a low-margin, high volume industry. These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need to become profitable. On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are just spamming the internet with their ads.

eis 10y ago

This thread seems actively being burried by HN. Now it's flagged as dupe and the previous thread from yesterday also quickly disappeared from the front page after gaining traction. Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far. HN mods: what happened here?

nathancahill 10y ago
The previous discussion was buried too. I'd also like to know why a link with +250 points is modded away. Obviously they are trying to keep it on the dl, but we really need some transparency when HN the news site conflicts with YC the fund. Edit: Here's a semi-buried sctb response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225

stemuk 10y ago

This discussion has no duplicate, so why is it marked as dupe??

PaulCapestany 10y ago

Don't want to be accused of being a shill (I'm not, I'm just a fan), but if you're looking for potential alternatives to RethinkDB, Couchbase (the company that was formed when the MemcacheD and CouchDB folks joined forces) offer a totally open source realtime-sync API/SDK (cross-platform: mobile, web, you name it). Link: http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile

robertjpayne 10y ago
Couchbase is a very very different product under the hood. Be aware you have to run Couchbase with their minimum spec cluster requirements ( 3 nodes, tons of CPU and RAM ) just to ensure you don't lose data because it syncs from ram to disk at best every 100ms
- HodGreeley 10y ago
  Hod @ Couchbase here. This is inaccurate. Couchbase does not delay in writing to disk (some other dbs do). You typically want 3 nodes for high availability and failover, but it isn't required. Auto replication can also help avoid loss in many failure scenarios.
  - robertjpayne 10y ago
    I'd actually love to be proven wrong, Couchbase looks awesome on paper but some Couchbase staff even confirmed this with me here https://forums.couchbase.com/t/persistence-durability-guarentees/9860/7 https://forums.couchbase.com/t/persistence-durability-guaren...
    - HodGreeley 10y ago
      This is complicated, because you're intertwining Sync Gateway and Couchbase Server. Couchbase Server queues writes immediately. The default is to ack once a write is in Server memory, but you can choose other options. See the response from daschl in that thread. I see what you were trying to get at with your question. I'm not sure we clarified enough what's going on. I'll respond on the forum.

tleyden5iwx 10y ago

It looks like RethinkDB is relying solely on revenue from training and support. Is that even feasible for a product like theirs? I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database with-scaling-issues} cluster. But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has: * Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training) * Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support) Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection. I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep RethinkDB alive? Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not working for them?

williamstein 10y ago
They were trying to pivot to at least two additional revenue models during he last year, but it seems to have simply took too long (1. Custom closed code for enterprise customers, 2. Hosted Horizon). I have paid RethinkDB for support by the way, just to support them.
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istinspring 10y ago
RethinkDB is not perfect there is tons of issues. For example it useing too much memory for the large volumes of data and then performance tends to degrade.

nutanc 10y ago

IBM's compose supports rethinkDB. Will they continue to support?

shobhitverma 10y ago

RethinkDB was closest thing I knew to SecDB. I used to love SecDB when I was using it. http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sachss-most-valued-trading-weapon-1473242401 http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sach...

tshannon 10y ago

So what alternatives are there to Rethink? Not excited about Mongo. Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?

bbulkow 10y ago

Founder of a (non YC) database company here. Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do. The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail. Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size. Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.

frankleng 10y ago

perhaps https://www.pipelinedb.com/ https://www.pipelinedb.com/ can be an alternative as well. It's not that we are super set on using RethinkDB, but love ReQL! Going back to SQL just seems a huge step back at this point.

lvca 10y ago

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of OrientDB (http://orientdb.com http://orientdb.com), another reactive database. It looks like the RethinkDB project will be alive if it will be maintained by the community or if it could find another sponsor. But if you are looking for an alternative take a look at OrientDB Live Query feature: http://orientdb.com/livequery/ http://orientdb.com/livequery/. It doesn't cover 100% what RethinkDB provides, but it's something very close. The OrientDB's license is Apache 2 (so FREE for any usage) and a commercial 24x7 support is available on request.