23 ms·

RethinkDB is shutting down

• uptown 10y ago
  Bummer. Had Rethink in my list of things to eventually tinker-with. Is it stable where it should still be considered as a viable choice for your tech stack, or is this pretty much a deal-breaker?
  • habitue 10y ago
    It is stable, performant, and has an amazing query language!
  • VeXocide 10y ago
    RethinkDB is production stable as shown by a number of users running it in production, this won't change that. I'm optimistic that it'll do just fine as an open-source project. Jeroen / VeXocide here, one of the RethinkDB engineers
  • haneefmubarak 10y ago
    I actually maintain an app that uses a RethinkDB cluster that's been up for over a year (despite occasional peak loads that exceed capacity), so yeah it's pretty stable. I've had multiple virtual servers fail (this is all in a cloud) and have to be replaced in that time frame, but the cluster itself never went down.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    It is hard to tell. I am wondering the same thing after having massively invested in building code on top of RethinkDB. I am not optimistic at all. At a minimum I wish Slava had announced a plan to relicense under BSD or Apache. This is the moment when he could do it and he hasn't.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • ivan-kleshnin 10y ago
    It's pretty stable.
• flamedoge 10y ago
  I await to hear postmortem on what went wrong
• programminggeek 10y ago
  What was RethinkDB's business model and why didn't it work?
  • rodrickbrown 10y ago
    Trying to sell opensource software with great documentation.
    • chipotle_coyote 10y ago
      I knew I should have left out a few verbs on every page!
    • pluma 10y ago
      *Trying to sell training and support for opensource software with great documentation and few bugs. At least that's what the website indicates.
• haneefmubarak 10y ago
  This is honestly quite depressing for me to hear. I've always liked the team and the fantastic product they created. A couple of years ago, when I was working on a DB product myself, I met a few of their team and I was just blown away by how nice and welcoming they were, even to someone developing a product that could potentially compete with theirs. Later onwards, when I was working on an NLP startup earlier this year, I opted to use RethinkDB because I had seen how clean, smooth, and fast its internals were. When I had a hiccup with running a cluster in here cloud and tweeted about it, Mike and others from. The RethinkDB team instantly reached out to me and helped me resolve the issue.
  • TheMissingPiece 10y ago
    Hi Haneef :D I was one of the peeps you met at OSCON. Hope to see you around and on Twitter still <3
• aeharding 10y ago
  Very sad to hear, but hopefully the software will continue to be developed in an open source format. Keep this in mind when you invest in a certain technology: some organizations, especially nonprofits (for example, the Apache Software Foundation, Python Software Foundation, the new Node Foundation) are probably going to support and develop their software for extended periods of time relative to, say, a startup or for-profit (Parse, MongoDB and RethinkDB immediately come to mind).
  • nine_k 10y ago
    This is why the key product should be open-source. Else it's too scary to invest in it: what if the company behind it folds, and you end up in a dead end? Only certain super-behemoths like Microsoft or Apple can afford to have their infrastructure products being closed-source.
    • brianwawok 10y ago
      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?
      • dcwca 10y ago
        I hope it wouldn't take you a year to hire someone qualified to fix it for you.
        • geofft 10y ago
          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.)
• ginkgotree 10y ago
  This is really so sad. RethinkDB is top notch. Truly a great team.
• kevindeasis 10y ago
  Ive been teaching my siblings programming. It took them literally a day to learn rethinkDB. That should say a lot about how amazing RethinkDB is. It's unfortunate to see this get shut down as RethinkDB is pretty easy to work with
• jarrettch 10y ago
  Just started a new project at my company using RethinkDB, very early stages, but I was amazed at how well this was documented and implemented. Coming from different ORMs to use with MongoDB, ReQL was a joy to work with and I didn't even want to use an ORM(for me at least, others may disagree). Sad day to me, but as an open source tech, I hope and trust it will continue to live on. It sounds like the company landed at Stripe. Good for them. Glad they weren't left out in the cold. Thank you all very much for your hard work. In my short period of time I have had using RethinkDB, it's been a pleasure to work with.
  • puddintane 10y ago
    Exact same boat - I've based a few new api's with RethinkDB in the background - hoping it stays alive.
• niahmiah 10y ago
  Quite a sad development. I always thought they would have found more success if they had adopted MongoDB's API (or similar).
  • habitue 10y ago
    Personally I'm really glad we didn't go that route. ReQL is an amazing, well thought out language. You could make the same argument about Mongo should have emulated SQL. In practice other factors dominate.
    • anilgulecha 10y ago
      Mongo already had "won" the NoSQL battle. So if rethink had made it compatible with mongo's query language, I can imagine that when Mongo was getting all the bad-press many would have jumped their backend to Rethink, without having to worry about modifying their application. Of course, this is with the benefit of looking back, but the parent's hypothesis has legs.
      • ivan-kleshnin 10y ago
        What are you talking about man? There are tons of successful NoSQL databases with non-JSON query syntax. Neo4J, Redis... should I continue. I never missed this format using ReQL and it would be a bloat to support both in parallel.
      • niahmiah 10y ago
        Exactly. RethinkDB had basically the same traits as MongoDB, with real-time features as a bonus. It was never really competing with other RDBMS (that support transactions, etc.), it was competing directly with MongoDB.
• joneholland 10y ago
  A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.
  • toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Who says Mongo won't go eventually as well?
    • bhouston 10y ago
      MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. Well promoted and easy to get going with. Hopefully they use the money they have to rewrite MongoDB to be better.
      • colemickens 10y ago
        >MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems. I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-never-ever-ever-use-mongodb/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...
        • threeseed 10y ago
          That post is utter garbage. Seriously. Most of the the points are for issues that were fixed years ago and then you get classics like "forces the poor habit of implicit schemas in nearly all usecases" as if some developer is going to somehow stumble on the fact is it a schemaless database. It's like trying to say "Linux is shit" because of issues found in 1.0 of the kernel.
          • deleted 10y ago
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          • colemickens 10y ago
            Normally when things are citing @aphyr, I tend to give them some weight, but even aphyr's post is rather old. Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more investigation before posting the link again.
• melvinmt 10y ago
  > We’re excited that the members of our engineering team will be joining Stripe So is this one of Stripe's BYOT hires?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • kevinyun 10y ago
    I would be curious to know this as well
• tbrock 10y ago
  I hope this isn't true. Having worked at/on multiple competitors I have nothing but respect and admiration for the work the RethinkDB team has done to make a great database and development platform. This was real technology! I'm truly sad that the environment is such that great work like this can't continue to be funded. Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation, caring about the fundamentals, and for the incrediblly snazzy admin panel.
  • nine_k 10y ago
    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.
    • geofft 10y ago
      So, maybe we should find a way to develop good technology that doesn't involve for-profit companies?
      • hueving 10y ago
        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?
        • geofft 10y ago
          I don't know, I feel like lots of people donate to universities to spend their times solving problems that almost nobody has. Or maybe they don't, but somehow that money still exists. How does that work? Why are we assuming that everything has to be done by companies? What if we establish a National Science Foundation for fundamental CS research?
• bhouston 10y ago
  That is sad. We were considering switching to RethinkDB from MongoDB.
  • chipotle_coyote 10y ago
    Don't write off RethinkDB yet.
    • ryan-allen 10y ago
      I hope not, I've always wanted to use it, it seems like a great product!
    • tomatsu 10y ago
      Yea, it's pretty much feature-complete (as far as I'm concerned) at this point, major performance issues were addressed, and the documentation is excellent. The project itself is in fantastic shape. They even added Windows support half a year ago.
  • ucaetano 10y ago
    Maybe you should rethink that decision.
• andrewl-hn 10y ago
  Loved that they took care of the engineers! Stripe is a great place to work where their expertise is surely welcomed.
  • joekrill 10y ago
    This is what I thought was the best detail of all this. I don't know the details so this may not be totally accurate, but it sounds like they didn't just shut down and let everyone fend for themselves. Looks like they helped make sure all their employees were taken care of. Too many employers just throw their employees by the wayside when the business goes south. So kudos to them for taking care of their folks.
• KirinDave 10y ago
  This is really sad. RethinkDB is an amazing product.
• jmcgough 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with RethinkDB - what was their monetization strategy?
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Sell support contracts. Kind of similar to MongoDB's strategy, but they were too late to the party. Also the "support" open source business model doesn't always scale well and works better when the product quality and documentation isn't so first rate (like Rethinkdb's is).
    • d23 10y ago
      I've always found that to be a perverse incentive model. I don't know how to do any better though. Maybe shaming companies that use OS projects heavily into donating? Not really sure how to scale that either.
      • sratner 10y ago
        I currently pay someone else to host a rethinkdb cluster. I'd rather pay rethinkdb.com to do that, but they didn't offer. I am sure they considered it and figured it wasn't a good model for them. It is unfortunate that I have (with much pleasure) used rethinkdb in several projects, yet haven't had a chance to pay them for a service that would be useful to me.
        • dkersten 10y ago
          I've actually wondered about this too. I would happily pay rethinkdb.com for hosted rethinkdb :-(
        • pluma 10y ago
          As I understand it, running a SaaS business is a huge undertaking in itself, so doing that while maintaining an open source database can be daunting and -- like any business -- risky.
      • 10y ago
• saiko-chriskun 10y ago
  ugh.
• marknadal 10y ago
  My greatest condolences to you guys. I have met with Slava a couple times, and with Mike several. They are incredibly down to earth and I felt they were very important to contributing to the democratization and humanization of databases (an otherwise unfortunately very vicious and elitist industry). So what is next? I need to strongly remind people that both Mozilla Firefox and Blender were Open Source projects that survived their parent companies. This is not a death statement, and very easily could be a rebirth of Rethink. Despite working on a competing database, I want to take a moment to explain why RethinkDB is the best in its chosen niche, by comparing it to other options out there: - MongoDB. You won't get realtime updates and relational documents if you use MongoDB compared to RethinkDB. - MySQL/Postgres. Rethink's awesome ReQL query language is a joy to work with compared to standard SQL. Without Rethink, you'll be missing document storage and live queries. - gunDB. Our model is Master-Master, which while we think is great, it fundamentally restricts you from building Strongly Consistent systems, like banking apps, etc. RethinkDB is the only realtime updating Master-Slave system out there. They clearly win here. - Redis. RethinkDB still has amazing speed and performance, but offers so much more than Redis by itself can. - Hadoop. I know less here, but I've heard that RethinkDB has an amazing query optimization engine. Automatically taking your query and sharding it out across the distributed storage system. RethinkDB is a winner in these technical aspects and fits for a very well defined problem. I encourage people to still use it and contribute to it if their business matches that. Don't let news like this deter you, or else we would have lost gems like FireFox and Blender. Best regards to you guys, you are awesome.
• whoopdedo 10y ago
  How long have the Mets fans been doing that hammer cheer? Because it looks eerily similar to another arm swinging chant that another NL East team does.
  • grennis 10y ago
    Watch out for the Braves next year, won 20 of last 30 and 12 of last 14.
• jgord 10y ago
  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. Its an important longterm technology play - just the kind we need to improve things for all of us. In two or three years I think they would be making money, I think this is a failure of capitalism or imagination our HN/SV community. To those several of us who have the power to write a check, please consider doing so, Rethink have been relentlessly building the future [ and you will make money ]
  • hueving 10y ago
    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.
    • erichocean 10y ago
      > 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.
      • roachpq 10y ago
        > 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 appear to have landed late last year. Why wasn't I informed! So thank you for this - time for me to take another look at it.
• djsumdog 10y ago
  Haven't played with it, but everyone about RethinkDB looks positive. Hopefully it will continue to develop in the open source community. There are so many projects that really need attention to keep open source growing. I started looking at what I could do for IRCv3 projects recently because I'd really like to support an open source alternative to Slack.
• OhSoHumble 10y ago
  This is heartbreaking. I have used it for a couple of different projects and it's just a dream to work with.
• pc 10y ago
  RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a database could be and how it should work. I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort. I'm also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we've gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Rethinks -- and shared some of our plans with them and gotten their feedback -- we've become pretty convinced that we can build some excellent products together in the future. I'm looking forward to learning from all of them. [1] (And, for me, even before Stripe -- I started learning Haskell with Slava's Lisp-interpreter-in-Haskell tutorial back in 2006... http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html)
  • heyts 10y ago
    As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product. On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/ https://changelog.com/114/
    • coffeemug 10y ago
      Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
      • api 10y ago
        That is very good to hear. We just ported our backend to use it after evaluating many other options including managed databases. It's really a top quality piece of software in every respect, combining much of what's good about nosql with relational features and robustness. The ease of clustering across data centers is just phenomenal. Would still recommend it in spite of this bit of uncertainty.
• silasb 10y ago
  Wow, I've always used RethinkDB for toy DB stuff here and there, but nothing serious. I loved how well everything was put together, from the documentation to the homepage. Hopefully the project can live with OSS contributions.
• deleted 10y ago
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• dantiberian 10y ago
  I've been working on a Clojure RethinkDB driver for about a year now, and I've always been incredibly impressed with the Rethink team. Their openness, friendliness, and helpfulness when asking questions has always been outstanding. You'll be sorely missed all.
• rer 10y ago
  I wish RethinkDB had published a performance benchmark against Hadoop. It'd be enough to show the world how ahead of its times RethinkDB is. I also wish I knew what RethinkDB's investors are thinking.
  • lobster_johnson 10y ago
    By Hadoop, do you mean HBase? Something else? I'm not sure how much overlap there is. Rethink is geared towards ad-hoc OLTP-type patterns (albeit with a document-like data model), whereas Hadoop is oriented around batch/stream processing. A better comparison would be CouchDB or MongoDB.
• wutf 10y ago
  Time to rethink RethinkDB.
• ekmartin 10y ago
  https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commit/2cfc76a754ede73d039884924b7c6ae91843ac6b https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commit/2cfc76a754ede7... :(
• adharmad 10y ago
  Very sad to know that RethinkDB is shutting down. This was one company that I wanted to see being successful! A great tech team taking on a hard technical problem. Even if they are closing down, I hope they have changed the landscape. Also having followed Slava for a sometime, nothing but respect and admiration for him!
• mangeletti 10y ago
  Does anyone have experience with Postgres' pubsub[1] as a means for realtime apps? 1. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/sql-notify.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/sql-notify.html
  • habitue 10y ago
    One of the big differences that RethinkDB has going for it is that its connections are based on coroutines, so it's really efficient to have thousands of open connections. Postgres uses one process per connection, so it's much harder to scale.
    • kod 10y ago
      pgbouncer
      • orthecreedence 10y ago
        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.
        • kod 10y ago
          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.
          • habitue 10y ago
            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
• jnordwick 10y ago
  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 a list of places it fails). This isn't meant to be harsh, but these are times to learn, not simply pat each other on the back.
  • VeXocide 10y ago
    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.
  • TheMissingPiece 10y ago
    Slava mentioned in his blog post that he would be writing some lessons learned over the upcoming months. The fact that this is an open source project that should continue to live on helps with the reception, too. It's sad news to see the company shut down, but it's positive news to know that we can still keep the project alive.
  • jkarneges 10y ago
    If I had to speculate, I'd say that they spent a long time in development before monetizing, longer than investors were willing to entertain. It's hard for a B2B company to raise a Series B without a thoroughly proven revenue engine. I don't know how this could have been fixed though. Databases are hard to develop and it's a tough market to crack. Enterprises aren't going to buy an incomplete product, especially not a database, which is arguably the most critical component in the entire stack. Anyone investing would have to know that this would be a years-long effort to build a solid product before the first dollar. Perhaps RethinkDB could have shortened their development time by not pivoting around (originally SSD optimizations, later realtime. also Horizon is a bit of a mini-pivot), but I don't know by how much.
    • erichocean 10y ago
• crudbug 10y ago
  Core tech products are hard to sell. With so many passengers on big data boat - MemSQL / VoltDB / Postgres / DataStax / DataBricks / Cloudera / Horton many more. Your sales force strength becomes critical. Waiting for insider insights.
  • AliaksandrH 10y ago
    Not only your sales force, technology is also a big differentiator: all of the mentioned technologies are very different from one another. My bet is on MemSQL
• longsien 10y ago
  I love Rethink and Horizon. Are there great risks in continuing to use Rethink even if development has stopped?
  • dimfeld 10y ago
    Probably not. It's all open-source and they're trying to get a development community going around the project.
• misterbowfinger 10y ago
  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.
  • sotojuan 10y ago
    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.
    • erikpukinskis 10y ago
      Well, Couch DB got there first but it didn't help them much. I think you're right it was mostly about social media marketing.
      • anilgulecha 10y ago
        I think couch never caught on because of it's very different querying paradigm that was enough of a friction to mass adoption.(which has only been fixed by making a mongo like DSL in the 2.0 release).
      • jwhitlark 10y ago
        Early couch had scaling problems. We built a product around it and had a terrible time keeping it running at scale. Ruined erlang for me, too. Not from the language, but the problems with the build tools.
    • latch 10y ago
      I'm not sure if anyone else ran into this, but I evaluated RethinkDB for three separate projects over the years, and there was always that one missing feature. I don't remember exactly what they were, but I think the first time it was secondary indexes, the second was full text search and the third was geo indexes. Went with Postgres for all three. When Windows Phone 7 came out, without background tasks, MS was quick to point out that the iPhone didn't originally have it either. It was a silly argument; Neither Apple nor Google were selling phones without that feature at that time. I'm not saying Rethink did anything wrong. And by bringing up MS, I don't want anyone to think Rethink had the same sense of entitlement as Microsoft. Your v1 has to compete against your competitors current version, not their 5-year old v1. RethinkDB had a lot of powerful features, but it also lacked a lot of features that for me, and I have to suspect many others, made it an impossible choice. (Also, I hated the query syntax. I was willing to fight through it, but I often wondered if that was turning people off)
• cybrix 10y ago
  This is very sad to hear this looked like a real product. Quite off-topic but has anyone managed to implement something similar to Changefeeds in MongoDB? RethinkDB sends both old data and new data and watching the oplog sounds like a bad idea.
  • habitue 10y ago
    That's what literally everyone does for changes on mongo, from Meteor to Firebase. There isn't another way
    • kabes 10y ago
      Honestly interested: how do you know Firebase works that way and do you have any links to more info about how Firebase works?
      • habitue 10y ago
        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.
        • tlarkworthy 10y ago
          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.
          • habitue 10y ago
            Ah, ok, I must have misremembered. Apologies
• ronreiter 10y ago
  If RethinkDB is really better than Mongo then where is the blog post about it? Where are all the scaffolding tools? The examples? I have only heard of Rethink because I read HN every day. But no one knows about it. That is obviously the reason it failed - bad marketing.
  • Semiapies 10y ago
    Yes, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, an X-is-Shutting-Down post about a company I've actually heard of...Well, on Hacker News."
  • sotojuan 10y ago
    It sucks because the Rethink site is well designed, they have a good brand design and mascot, the docs are great, and the team is (was?) open and responsive. They talked at conferences, did podcasts, etc. A little bit of sales work and marketing would've gone a long way. Of course, it's hard to be profitable at NoSQL after Mongo either got all the hype years before or turned people off the concept entirely.
    • progx 10y ago
      That's the problem, they were too good. Developers like hackable systems with bugs and problems they can solve, this is how they get "experts", bigger communities grow, more posts exists, the project get more attention. E.g. WordPress, it is not one of the most used CMS out there because it is the best. But, not always the best system is the winner.
• sheeshkebab 10y ago
  Why is there no "Pricing" section on their website? how were they making money? (if any)
  • pluma 10y ago
    Try the "Services" section. As far as I know they only offered commercial support and training. I'm not sure whether they also had a "dual licensing" model (i.e. allowing customers to give them money to get a copy of RethinkDB with a proprietary license instead of AGPL) but it's certainly not mentioned on the website.
    • sheeshkebab 10y ago
      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.
      • pluma 10y ago
        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) and I'm sure I'm not the only one to think that way. Considering even GPL-licensed software often prominently advertises commercial dual-licensing, this seems like a major oversight (if it wasn't for ideological reasons).
        • timmaxw 10y ago
          > 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/ https://rethinkdb.com/faq/
• spullara 10y ago
  Really sorry to hear it Slava. You guys were doing great work. At the end of the day, I think that open source has really killed pure database companies aside from the incumbents. We'll see where MongoDB ends up but they have the advantage that a support contract business model works when your product needs support.
• GordyMD 10y ago
  I'm very upset to hear this. RethinkDB, and the team behind it, have been inspirational to me and it has transformed my day to day development workflow. Their dedication to developer experience (amazing docs, ReQL, admin tool,...) has been something I've particularly admired. I'm relieved that the team has a new home though and it's fantastic that a company that has similar traits is the destination - props to Stripe and the RethinkDB management team for making this happen. I hope to see RethinkDB to live on in the OS community.
• desireco42 10y ago
  I don't know what to think. I am angry and sad that my favorite db is going away?! On the other hand, I am trying to understand and be supportive of the team behind it, as I have huge respect for them and their work.
• saikat 10y ago
  I used Slava's blog to learn about Lisp and went on to build a product with Weblocks, which was a continuations-based web framework that Slava created back in the day (I only recently finally deleted a forgotten 8-year old todo about merging in my refactored Weblocks formview). Random trivia (kind of) - the syntax and concepts in Weblocks actually bear some resemblance to Goat, which is a framework that Patrick had created and used to build the original version of the Stripe dashboard (likely just because both of them come from a Lisp-heavy background). I had just started a new company using RethinkDB, and it was definitely poised to be my go to database for new projects. Anyway, all this is to say, for someone who I know only through his works, I have great respect for Slava and want to thank him for the work he's done. Here's to hoping that RethinkDB finds a way to continue.
• Fenn 10y ago
  Slava is one of the smartest people I've met (and I'm sure the rest of the team follows suite) - it's indeed sad that the RethinkDB company is no more. I feel we're at a stage where some of the key technologies/platforms are coming out of relatively small companies (docker, storm, rethinkdb, to name a few), however, it appears it can be tough to make a business out of this alone. I'm consequently very happy to see that the RethinkDB team have found a home at Stripe and hope that works as a setup to allow the talent to flourish and keep producing great work/innovations.
• _jezell_ 10y ago
  Slava is awesome. Rethink is awesome. Hope Stripe realizes investing in Rethink dev could pay massive dividends in developer goodwill.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• RangerScience 10y ago
  To be clear: As part of shutting down, you guys found new jobs as you could for employees? That's rad!
  • roel_v 10y ago
    For the engineers, it seems... Were there any other employees?
    • RangerScience 10y ago
      Yeah, I realized a while later: Same report could be from a toxic situation: I got me and by buddies out, didn't care about the rest. I didn't get that vibe from the article, tho.
    • pluma 10y ago
      AIUI the designer who also did their illustrations left the company in the lead-up to this announcement? Other than that, I have no idea. Tech companies tend to not advertise their staff beyond developer roles much.
  • Kiro 10y ago
    Maybe they used this: https://stripe.com/blog/bring-your-own-team https://stripe.com/blog/bring-your-own-team
• kbd 10y ago
  Really sad to hear this. I always had a ton of respect for you guys and your commitment to solid technology. (I mean y'all even passed Aphyr's Jepsen tests out of the gate [1]) You've also always paid a great deal of attention to interface, both in your query language and in administration. One of your engineers even wrote once that maybe you took longer than you should have and over-engineered some things, but now that that was in place y'all would be better off for it. I'm sorry that didn't wind up being the case, at least as far as your company is concerned. RethinkDB was at the top of my list of technologies I want to build something on. I even went to your (one?) meetup in Boulder. I guess my t-shirt is now a collectable :-/ But I'm happy for y'all that you wound up finding a great place you can all work together. Best of luck! [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5 https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5
• pinkskip 10y ago
  :(
• lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  I would be very interested hearing @coffeemug's views on the tension between building a business and building an open source product. (Those I know who have done this range from "never again" to "lost a fortune in sales")
• skndr 10y ago
  Mike has been one of the most genuine and helpful people I've met - always offering to lend an ear or offer suggestions and feedback. It must be really difficult to stop doing something that's been such a core part of your effort and thoughts for so long. I hope you and the team find interesting and engaging things to work on.
• hiphipjorge 10y ago
  As a former employee at Rethink, I'm super sad to hear about this, but know that they are all great people capable of even more than what they have accomplished with this amazing database! Will continue to recommend RethinkDB ferociously to everyone I know and will always fondly look back at my time there!
• jordanthoms 10y ago
  This is sad - Was planning on moving from Postgres to Rethink as our plan once we start to hit scalability limits / needing to shard. I guess we will see how the open source efforts go.
• chrischen 10y ago
  I find it hard to trust HN users as I was about to adopt and migrate from MongoDB to rethinkDB based on consensus by HN user comments about it being undeniably superior, yet it was actually close to shutting down apparently.
  • mguillemot 10y ago
    Well... The consensus is that RethinkDB is technically superior (and much more pleasant to use), but unfortunately that doesn't prevent it from being in a hard position business-wise...
• onurozkan 10y ago
  I'm glad they are joining Stripe, both of them great and cool companies.
• Kiro 10y ago
  While RethinkDB looks amazing I'm glad I didn't listen to the people here demanding me to switch from MongoDB. In the future I will just stick with what works.
  • jazoom 10y ago
    In my experience RethinkDB "just works" and Mongo didn't.
    • Kiro 10y ago
      MongoDB has served me well but HN almost convinced me to change even if I haven't had any problems. I'll never listen to you guys again because if I did I would be stuck with a scrapped database.
      • jazoom 10y ago
        RethinkDB isn't getting scrapped. You're sounding a little dramatic.
• laxd 10y ago
  I'd fund Slava and Mike again in a second. - Paul Graham on twitter
• ilaksh 10y ago
  People saying they "failed" -- I disagree. It is VERY hard to sell products that are essentially free. Its largely down network effects and luck or having an _in_ with the good old' boys network. Its not more popular than every other db..so what.. And the best systems are rarely the most popular. Btw popularity is not merit. But they made a badass database that relatively speaking IS very popular. So thats not failing. Thats winning. Also maybe these people are being more honest and responsible than some startups that keep flushing millions knowing they are unlikely to ever have a positive cash flow. Plus getting acquired by some company like Stripe, realistically, whether there was some big exit or not, is the dream of many people. So given the reality of the startup scene to say they 'failed' is a joke.
  • pluma 10y ago
    I agree in so far as that RethinkDB didn't fail as an open source project. RethinkDB is a great piece of technology with an even greater community. But RethinkDB evidently failed as a company. The announcement indicates we might learn more about how it failed specifically but at this point it seems like it simply didn't achieve one of two things: become cashflow positive or gain another investment/acquisition. It also seems the open source project will live on.
• amelius 10y ago
  It is sad to see that making a living from development tools is becoming less and less an option. Kudos to the RethinkDB team for trying, and giving us a very useful DB.
• patkai 10y ago
  RethinkDB was simply too good to be true. I've been reading Slavas defmacro.org probably since he started writing it, and was watching where he will end up. It was no disappointment that he created this with his cofounders, and while I'm a bit sad they couldn't find a viable business I know they are young and ambitions, we will hear from them. Go Slava!
• k__ 10y ago
  Interesting, I expected ArangoDB close shop before RethinkDB. I found both nice and even built a product on top of rethink over the last twelve months. Guess I was blended by the hype :D
  • hmexx 10y ago
    I would have guessed the same, just by amount of splash RethinkDB had on YC compared to Arango, but the truth is I MUCH prefer ArangoDB. Their AQL is a beautiful replacement for SQL. Javascript style query languages are what I hate the most about a lot of NoSQL Databases. The multi-model support is also really cool, i.e. not having to commit to graph/non-graph before even starting the project. Foxx I generally don't find as useful/interesting. I hope everyone who was "into" rethinkdb starts looking at ArangoDB now.
    • k__ 10y ago
      lol, now I'm anxious and will go back to postgres ;)
• antirez 10y ago
  Rethinkdb is great software that was really designed with technological goals, one after the other, in mind. I'm a bit surprised to see the company shutting down. I mean, in some way, it's years they work at the project, but in the final usable form the project is not so old after all... Anyway to make it viable for the project to have a good live as an OSS project, there is to build a big community of core developers, and that's hard, so as a first step what I would do to ensure the viability is to strip-down it as much as possible in order to reduce the codebase of the fundamental part of RethinkDB to a more manageable size/complexity.
• jondubois 10y ago
  This is very sad. RethinkDB is my favourite database engine of all time. I have huge respect for the RethinkDB team - They've put the product above everything else and they've made it accessible to as many developers as possible by making it open source. I think that in spite of this announcement, I will likely continue to use RethinkDB.
• h1d 10y ago
  A while ago, I heard how good RethinkDB is and tried to check it out and found this page. https://rethinkdb.com/docs/sql-to-reql/javascript/ https://rethinkdb.com/docs/sql-to-reql/javascript/ The more complex the query becomes I just felt everything was getting less intuitive compared to the SQL version and ended up not actually using it. For anyone who switched from SQL, I'd like to know how it felt to write RethinkDB queries. Did they start to feel fluent later on?
  • davidbanham 10y ago
    Very. The linear flow of data from left to right made it very easy to reason about complex queries.
    • h1d 10y ago
      I've wondered how it is not always chains of command from left to right like you mentioned, instead it encapsulates another expression starting from "r." here and there, which pretty much made me feel unintuitive at that time but regarding people's comment, I guess it will start to make sense well later on.
  • hasch 10y ago
    In general, I don't like those X-to-Y translation pages, when the underlying concepts fundamentally change. You can't use your existing sql mindset to translate to their query language, but instead try to learn from scratch.
    • pluma 10y ago
      I don't know. I think they're useful if you consider them as a "I want to do X in languages A and B" showcase rather than a literal translation guide. It can certainly help getting a feel for "how much more difficult/easier is this in A vs B?". We have a similar page at ArangoDB to help developers used to SQL to understand the general differences in AQL: https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/sql-aql-comparison/ https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/sql-aql-comparison/
  • 10y ago
• JulianMorrison 10y ago
  I think I'm gonna try and teach myself to work on this in its new open source incarnation, because I was rooting for it hard while it was still a company, but it was perpetually in a state of "soon, not yet", and now "not yet" is never unless the people who want it step up.
• hmexx 10y ago
  For people mourning the loss of rethinkDB, and who are interested in alternative document based NoSQL DBs under development, please checkout ArangoDB. It's my favorite NoSQL database. I have no affiliation with them. Beautiful query language called AQL, and graphing support (multi-model) baked in.
  • zenithm 10y ago
    Calling stored procedures microservices always makes me laugh.
• ianwalter 10y ago
  This is the most sad I've ever been for a software project folding. Good luck to the team.
• solidr53 10y ago
  Their chance of surviving would have increased dramatically if users could install rethinkdb as addon on Heroku. Availability as a service was an issue, the compose deal did not work well for me, as my stuff was hosted on heroku. Anyway, rethinkdb is probably the most awesome database I've tried. https://github.com/birkir/react-starter-kit-rdb https://github.com/birkir/react-starter-kit-rdb
• koolba 10y ago
  Per Crunchbase: Dec, 2013 $8M / Series A2 Sep, 2011 $3M / Series A Apr, 2010 $1.2M / Seed Jun, 2009 undisclosed amount / Seed Did the company have any revenue or was that the only money the company had to run on? Assuming that info is correct, that's pretty slim for building a "hard tech" type of company. Building a database (from scratch no less) is a lot of up front work. Even after it's built you need to convince tech people to want to use it, convince their bosses to let them use it, and even then, hire sales people to sell support contracts.
  • rer 10y ago
    Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years?
    • koolba 10y ago
      > Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years? Not necessarily. It's possible they still have cash on hand but limited runway. Anything leftover would go back to investors. That's assuming they never had any revenue. If they had money coming in, they could have spent that as well so the formula gets more complicated.
• ahmd 10y ago
  this seems to me kind of acquihire
• doczoidberg 10y ago
  Anyone has insights in firebase? I hope firebase will not get the same troubles.
• Suvitruf 10y ago
  Sad news, but I Gotta Believe!
• simon_acca 10y ago
  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 solid piece of software that does well where (many) other NoSQLs fall short, that is: * easy HA and automatic failover * easy auto sharding * rational query language * ease of administration and awareness (webUI) * realtime capabilities * perform well on the Jepsen test! Now, what could have they done differently to stay afloat? What avenues do we have to fund fund such great projects, whose point is being OSS? (I mean, one of the selling points of RethinkDB is that one can trust it in this land of NoSQLs that promise but don't deliver, and this is in part thanks to their open development processes)
  • formula1 10y ago
    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 waterline are examples of single apis in different environments. Even being able to use the database 100% in memory as a redis alternative would be nice. - supports transactions across shards natively - this is a difficult but important feature that mongodb is missing - supports document id transaction and table transaction - if Im only updating two documents, I have no interest in making many financial transactions wait for a table to be finished being used when I only care about 2 documents in that table. - "sync" feature on a table - pouchdb supports this for syncing a client with a server Rethinksb failed because, despite its sweet name, it wasnt solving that important of problems.
    • icc97 10y ago
      Do you mean 'niche' rather than 'nitch'?
• mrcwinn 10y ago
  I never used it in production (lack of need, not a lack of interest), but I always enjoyed playing with RethinkDB. Really fantastic work - both under the hood and the presentation on top. Be proud of the work everyone did. Stripe is a great home to end up at!
• samdung 10y ago
  RethinkDB fits into the category of products i love but do not use because i do not want to manage the underlying servers. I've moved to Firebase and other 'services' on the Google, AWS clouds. Given that this is the way many of us are operating (i.e. 'moving to the cloud'), i wonder what the state of open source software is going to be in the coming years ...
  • nathancahill 10y ago
    I'd like to caution you about doing this. Look at Parse. Not owning the "underlying servers" your product runs on is a liability, not a benefit.
    • samdung 10y ago
      We did weigh the options for/against but went with Firebase because they got acquired by Google and the Founders (and Google) made public promises not to shut it down. Again, we don't rely entirely on Firebase. There is always another database (like AWS Dynamodb or Google Cloud Datastore) in the picture ... but again all hosted in the cloud ... not much servers to manage for my team. If Google and AWS shut down ... thats when the fit shits the fan :)
      • falcolas 10y ago
        > If Google and AWS shut down I would be more concerned about what happens if your account on Google or AWS is shut down - much more likely, and less notice if it were to occur.
  • stemuk 10y ago
    Actually I did the opposite, since Firebase comes with a huge vendor lock-in. For smaller projects Firebase however may be a good fit, the Flame plan provides good value for 25 bucks a month. If your product needs scale up to the Blaze plan you are probably screwed...
• GirlsCanCode 10y ago
  The bigger issue is that NoSQL has come and gone.
• bryanh 10y ago
  Massive bummer - Slava and Mike and the team were super top-notch. RethinkDB will always be my goto to explain the delta between a great and a poor first experience for any dev tool.
• sixdimensional 10y ago
  RethinkDB advanced database technology. Congratulations on a good run. Like many things, we may not realize the impact of their work today, but with the product going open source, it can serve as both a learning tool/inspiration for new platforms in the future, as well something to build on. I imagine the product will take its place in the halls of database history, even if it didn't succeed in the market financially. This is a legacy to be proud of, and glad to see the team has somewhere awesome to go!
• skyfantom 10y ago
  Удачи)
• mrbogle 10y ago
  This is sad. Looking forward to the post-mortems. A question in the interim: Did rethink ever consider building a SaaS business around the product? What were the reasons against it? Were there (a lot of) customers asking for a hosted version?
• wojcikstefan 10y ago
  I recognize there's hundreds of different factors that played a role in the story of RethinkDB and its relatively poor adoption. I'd like to touch on one specific point (probably far from the most important one) - the name. I think you guys introduced friction very early on with some of the developers, because of your name. Given the context of our times where many of the devs joke around about "yet another 'revolutionary' database that claims to be different and then does the same thing, but dropping some crucial functionality" (for which I primarily blame MongoDB), "RethinkDB" can be considered a bit of a sardonic name. It can also read as "we need to reject the notions other databases are built on and rethink it all", which to more conservative devs can feel as an attack on decades of thought and design around their beloved MySQL and PostgreSQL. Basically, I think this name might actively discourage developers from adopting your db or at least playing around with it.
  • jdcarter 10y ago
    Now if we're going to talk names, CockroachDB is the one with the problem. I'm very interested in the project and follow it closely, but going to my senior management and saying "we're going to bank the company on Cockroach!" is going to be a really tough sell.
  • j8m88 10y ago
    You've got a good point here. Before actually using the product I thought the name was really gimmicky. Despite that, I had a fairly positive experience with RethinkDB. Their documentation was great and changefeeds were a great feature for what I was doing at the time.
• overcast 10y ago
  Holy shit, my worst nightmare is realized. I LOVE RethinkDB, I use it for EVERYTHING. It has everything I've ever wanted in a database. Relational documents, realtime feeds. Sadness. Someone better be picking up from where they left off.
  • formula1 10y ago
    You can pick it up where they left it off. It may sound cold and hostile but often open source projects fail because consumers cant become contributers. Perhaps finding a way to fund it like bounty source is a good path foreard
    • overcast 10y ago
      You're right, I can't become a contributor. I don't have the time, nor anywhere near the skill set to build a relational database.
      • formula1 10y ago
        You can build the skills, though I respect you may not have the time.
  • atis 10y ago
    It really is the best DB I've ever used. Would love to support the project with donations if that were possible.
    • overcast 10y ago
      I would totally pay a yearly "maintenance" cost.
• baristaGeek 10y ago
  I have tinkered with RethinkDB a lot recently. It's the NoSQL DB (and the DB of any kind, I believe) that has the deepest focus on real-time features, that mixed up with Golang's concurrent model can support really powerful and highly scalable real-time apps. But my question is, what are your thoughts on building more than a product but a business with RethinkDB? Will the support quality decrease? Will Stripe offer architectural consulting? Will developers be interested in learning ReQL?
• kerkeslager 10y ago
  RethinkDB is an amazing product. I've had the pleasure of using it a few times in my projects and the experience has always been very smooth. I would recommend RethinkDB to anyone, and you guys should be very proud of your work. I'm sad that all that excellent engineering hasn't translated into a profitable business model. Part of me wants to suggest you make a donation campaign, and I'd be happy to become a regular donor. But it's understandable and respectable that you guys want to move on to other ventures. I've also used Stripe's API and their systems are also very good. I'm glad to hear you'll find a place with another solid engineering team and I wish you guys all the best.
• cdaringe 10y ago
  Best of luck guys! RethinkDB is still #1 to me :). Hopefully this ship keeps sailing!
• cdaringe 10y ago
  Best of luck guys! RethinkDB is still #1 to me :). Hopefully this ship keeps sailing!
• the_common_man 10y ago
  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?
  • pluma 10y ago
    It doesn't have to be a lie. As far as I can tell they don't call them "customers" at any point, so they're most likely just "companies using RethinkDB". They might even use RethinkDB extensively -- that doesn't mean RethinkDB makes any money from it. It's not lying, not even misleading. It's just not a metric that translates into "this company is making lots of money". If you're a hugely successful open source project and every Fortune 500 company uses your tech that still doesn't mean you're financially viable unless those companies also give you enough money (e.g. for support and training, or proprietary licensing deals) to sustain yourself.
  • timmaxw 10y ago
    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 customers. Most users weren't buying support contracts.
    • the_common_man 10y ago
      Sorry, how is this possible? Lots of users. Lots of value. But no money? Makes no sense.
      • SamReidHughes 10y ago
        Consider the price of air.
• kriro 10y ago
  Looking forward to the more detailed writeups since I'd love to read why it wasn't possible to build a sustainable company around such an excellent product. Good move by Stripe to pick up these fantastic engineers.
• tehchromic 10y ago
  Ok I'm going to go with: Rethink is dead, long live Rethink!
• jeffy 10y ago
  Never used RethinkDB, but this is the first time I've seen an announcement this written as "we are shutting down, the team is moving to Stripe" rather than "We've been acquired by Stripe! Nothing will change except our product will stop working in 30 days" Much respect for the no-BS announcement.
• breatheoften 10y ago
  I'm sad for this. I really liked rethinkdb and thought the potential for future development seemed really promising. They seemed to really know how to ship -- it's sad to imagine the momentum they had created fizzling out ... i would've liked to have seen what they would have came up with over the next couple of years ...
• dylz 10y ago
  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. :)
• vmware508 10y ago
  I loved RethinkDB. I'm sad.
• thomaseng 10y ago
  This is depressing :/ I'm hoping RethinkDB will have an afterlife.
• v3ss0n 10y ago
  Since our startup is build entirely on Tornado + RethinkDB + Emberjs + Python , this is a huge blow. But i do not worry , since this is announced many folks willing to support from community and many willing to contribute to RethinkDB in terms of both profit sharing and code steps up. Also Stripe and Compose.io step up , to stand with RethinkDB . I for one , a Startup Enterprenuer and Founder of Software Agency from Myanmar , Promise to share at least 5% of our profit on projects developed using RethinkDB to keep it Running .