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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

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
  > Horizon is a bit of a mini-pivot When Horizon was announced, that's when I stopped even considering RethinkDB for new projects (even if it was a good fit, feature-wise). Call it a "business smell", but I'm not surprised to hear they've wound the business down.
  - elcritch 10y ago
    Good call, I missed that aspect of horizon. Though if they could've transitioned to a managed db / app service provider it might've provided a way to keep going. Makes me think the mini-pivot was "a dollar short, a day late", and that perhaps managed PaaS could provide good revenue models for open source infrastructure.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  Just looking at some of the RethinkDB and ReQL stuff, I certainly wouldn't have used it. Two things hit me immediately: - bad performance - a dearth of types (literally only a single numeric type that is a 64-bit float, so that eliminates entire categories that rely on integer/fixed-precision exact arithmetic. Also, time series are seriously hurt by that decision. I've seen DBs have to move to 64-bit longs because of that issue alone. Having a pseudo-type layered on top is just going to tie up CPU cycles in the encode/decodes that need to happen. (Plus milliseconds aren't enough in a nano-second world now.) This whole "let's do everything with as few types as possible" I hope is a fad that will just die quickly in the DB world. This is with about 20 minutes of looking around and just listing a few things. It looks like RethinkDB was written by web devs for web devs and I don't think that can compete in the database world. You might get the web devs onboard, but the database and HPC people at the firm will probably look at it and go "how quaint when can we get Oracle/Postgres/Informix/etc up and running?"
  - jkarneges 10y ago
    Well, to each his own, but I don't think the product was the problem. Lots of people love RethinkDB. The comments here are proof of that.
bkanber 10y ago
He literally said he'd be following up with lessons learned. Now is the time for pats on the back. Communities are supposed to be supportive, too. Pity this thread is the only time I've seen that on HN as of late!
vegabook 10y ago
> KDB knocks the socks off everything else ...but the licence is 250k dollars a year so big fail for startups.
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  That's the salary of a single employee. Surely they can afford a database on the payroll.
  - vegabook 10y ago
    please do introduce me to your generous VC. At current low interest rates, building a stack that is reliant on KDB, will cause a large valuation hit because you're effectively locked into a negative -250k/year cashflow in perpetuity. At a 5% discount rate for example that's more than 5m USD of inflexible negative NPV right up front. Look there are fintech applications where this will be seen as fine (right tool for the job might be the big difference between success and failure) but you'll admit that it's a big ask for the less conventional "disruptor" style businesses which may not have big ticket upfront funding.
    - miguelrochefort 10y ago
      You're right. I did not think this through.
      - jnordwick 10y ago
        It isn't that you didn't think it completely through, just that there are a lot of variables that go into any hiring or tech decision. Take this for instance (but it generalizes to many others): does the DB reduce your need for developers? does it open new market segments? does it reduce your need for developers? does it open new areas to target? Startups are hard (Ive failed a couple times and had it work a couple times - definitely not always through my own effort). My current view on this is that RethikDB didn't rethink enough They solved a probabem without much money involved and too small. They might be great devs, but just diidn't solve a prolblem that needed to be solved.
peterlk 10y ago
Those of us who have had failed startups can tell you that pats on the back and community support help. The Hype Machine would have you believe that failure is opportunity, and that you get a chip on your shoulder when you fail; but failure means failing (grade F in the US) and it hurts. A lot. They mentioned that they will be releasing more post-mortems later. For now, I'm comfortable with supporting them and hearing about their learning later. The RethinkDB team built an amazing product that many people appreciated - as noted by the comments here- and for that they have my praise and admiration. The fact that the product will continue without the business is also noteworthy. Well done all
feklar 10y ago
There's a lot of existing document-oriented databases like RethinkDB such as MongoDB, CouchDB, RavenDB, ect and they all have the same network bandwidth problem for geo-replication http://acmsocc.github.io/2015/posters/socc15posters-final52.pdf http://acmsocc.github.io/2015/posters/socc15posters-final52.... I guess those other document-oriented dbms just had better early stage shilling to get funding before RethinkDB did, and by the time Rethink shopped around there was already enough competitors that investments in documented-oriented dbms dried up. The current state of the art is an in-memory dbms to take advantage of future available (soon, 2017) non-volatile memory. CMU is developing such a dbms http://pelotondb.org/ http://pelotondb.org/ and there's also MemSql and Sap Hana.
tlogan 10y ago
I can just speculate just as a user playing with RethinkDB (and having programing database SW from Tandem NonStop days) - for me, it seems like RethinkDB did not solve problem companies using databases and having money needs to be solved. I think they needed to develop just one feature which cannot be done by Oracle and that is that. The other problem could be that NoSQL hype just died out :(
human_error 10y ago
> Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Because nobody used it.
pdeva1 10y ago
i wrote my thoughts here: http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-marketing/ http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-m...
- jnordwick 10y ago
  I don't agree with some of what you said, but at least you are taking a chance to try and figure out what when wrong. You have been bookmarked :)

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
> Horizon is a bit of a mini-pivot When Horizon was announced, that's when I stopped even considering RethinkDB for new projects (even if it was a good fit, feature-wise). Call it a "business smell", but I'm not surprised to hear they've wound the business down.
- elcritch 10y ago
  Good call, I missed that aspect of horizon. Though if they could've transitioned to a managed db / app service provider it might've provided a way to keep going. Makes me think the mini-pivot was "a dollar short, a day late", and that perhaps managed PaaS could provide good revenue models for open source infrastructure.
jnordwick 10y ago
Just looking at some of the RethinkDB and ReQL stuff, I certainly wouldn't have used it. Two things hit me immediately: - bad performance - a dearth of types (literally only a single numeric type that is a 64-bit float, so that eliminates entire categories that rely on integer/fixed-precision exact arithmetic. Also, time series are seriously hurt by that decision. I've seen DBs have to move to 64-bit longs because of that issue alone. Having a pseudo-type layered on top is just going to tie up CPU cycles in the encode/decodes that need to happen. (Plus milliseconds aren't enough in a nano-second world now.) This whole "let's do everything with as few types as possible" I hope is a fad that will just die quickly in the DB world. This is with about 20 minutes of looking around and just listing a few things. It looks like RethinkDB was written by web devs for web devs and I don't think that can compete in the database world. You might get the web devs onboard, but the database and HPC people at the firm will probably look at it and go "how quaint when can we get Oracle/Postgres/Informix/etc up and running?"
- jkarneges 10y ago
  Well, to each his own, but I don't think the product was the problem. Lots of people love RethinkDB. The comments here are proof of that.

bkanber 10y ago

He literally said he'd be following up with lessons learned. Now is the time for pats on the back. Communities are supposed to be supportive, too. Pity this thread is the only time I've seen that on HN as of late!

vegabook 10y ago

> KDB knocks the socks off everything else ...but the licence is 250k dollars a year so big fail for startups.

miguelrochefort 10y ago
That's the salary of a single employee. Surely they can afford a database on the payroll.
- vegabook 10y ago
  please do introduce me to your generous VC. At current low interest rates, building a stack that is reliant on KDB, will cause a large valuation hit because you're effectively locked into a negative -250k/year cashflow in perpetuity. At a 5% discount rate for example that's more than 5m USD of inflexible negative NPV right up front. Look there are fintech applications where this will be seen as fine (right tool for the job might be the big difference between success and failure) but you'll admit that it's a big ask for the less conventional "disruptor" style businesses which may not have big ticket upfront funding.
  - miguelrochefort 10y ago
    You're right. I did not think this through.
    - jnordwick 10y ago
      It isn't that you didn't think it completely through, just that there are a lot of variables that go into any hiring or tech decision. Take this for instance (but it generalizes to many others): does the DB reduce your need for developers? does it open new market segments? does it reduce your need for developers? does it open new areas to target? Startups are hard (Ive failed a couple times and had it work a couple times - definitely not always through my own effort). My current view on this is that RethikDB didn't rethink enough They solved a probabem without much money involved and too small. They might be great devs, but just diidn't solve a prolblem that needed to be solved.

peterlk 10y ago

Those of us who have had failed startups can tell you that pats on the back and community support help. The Hype Machine would have you believe that failure is opportunity, and that you get a chip on your shoulder when you fail; but failure means failing (grade F in the US) and it hurts. A lot. They mentioned that they will be releasing more post-mortems later. For now, I'm comfortable with supporting them and hearing about their learning later. The RethinkDB team built an amazing product that many people appreciated - as noted by the comments here- and for that they have my praise and admiration. The fact that the product will continue without the business is also noteworthy. Well done all

feklar 10y ago

There's a lot of existing document-oriented databases like RethinkDB such as MongoDB, CouchDB, RavenDB, ect and they all have the same network bandwidth problem for geo-replication http://acmsocc.github.io/2015/posters/socc15posters-final52.pdf http://acmsocc.github.io/2015/posters/socc15posters-final52.... I guess those other document-oriented dbms just had better early stage shilling to get funding before RethinkDB did, and by the time Rethink shopped around there was already enough competitors that investments in documented-oriented dbms dried up. The current state of the art is an in-memory dbms to take advantage of future available (soon, 2017) non-volatile memory. CMU is developing such a dbms http://pelotondb.org/ http://pelotondb.org/ and there's also MemSql and Sap Hana.

tlogan 10y ago

I can just speculate just as a user playing with RethinkDB (and having programing database SW from Tandem NonStop days) - for me, it seems like RethinkDB did not solve problem companies using databases and having money needs to be solved. I think they needed to develop just one feature which cannot be done by Oracle and that is that. The other problem could be that NoSQL hype just died out :(

human_error 10y ago

> Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Because nobody used it.

pdeva1 10y ago

i wrote my thoughts here: http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-marketing/ http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-m...

jnordwick 10y ago
I don't agree with some of what you said, but at least you are taking a chance to try and figure out what when wrong. You have been bookmarked :)