11 ms·

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 B2

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.
  - jnordwick 10y ago
    This is the exact kind of comment I was warning against. The "it surely can't be the technology!" comment when yes, Shirley, it really can be. Even the best database systems I know (orders of magnitude quantitatively better than RethinkDB) have areas of technical weakness. And not just some areas, but usual gaping valleys. Nothing does everything well, and if it tries to it usually does everything below average. Time to man up. Performance really was crappy? That only having a float for your ONLY number type really was kind of dumb? Having no native datetime was bad? Saddling timezones on the pseudo datetime was a brainfart? Milliseconds only was shortsighted? Horizon was a bad idea too soon? Document databases are the new object databases - forever 5 years away? Aggregates were poorly done? Nobody really knew how to do stationary time series properly (I read through the GitHub issues regarding this and it was laughable that these people called themselves database experts)? and on and on. I'm not saying all of this is true. I'm saying let's be straight and not always blame sales and marketing or dumb consumers or C-level execs or everybody but our own crappy code.
    - _benedict 10y ago
      Having worked for a successful(ish) database vendor, I can say that user stupidity (ignorance) is a major factor in database software success. Literally no users, and almost no employees at the vendors, I would bet (if my experience is not unique) have any idea of the qualities of the software they use/peddle, its semantics or guarantees, or its performance characteristics or how to use it correctly. This makes the technology secondary; what is most important is how well you carve out mindshare. Whether that is even primarily down to "good" marketing is something I doubt. In the modern saturated database market, it is entirely unclear to me how you win sufficient mindshare and trust to obtain a wide enough (paying) userbase. I have no idea if RethinkDB was "good" or not, as I did not take the time to investigate; I have little interest in "document stores". It actually seemed to me they had some pretty solid engineering foundations; the kind of thing that the industry should value highly, but due to poor information is unable to price into their purchasing decision, and as a result is missing in many modern (especially OSS) database offerings today.

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.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  This is the exact kind of comment I was warning against. The "it surely can't be the technology!" comment when yes, Shirley, it really can be. Even the best database systems I know (orders of magnitude quantitatively better than RethinkDB) have areas of technical weakness. And not just some areas, but usual gaping valleys. Nothing does everything well, and if it tries to it usually does everything below average. Time to man up. Performance really was crappy? That only having a float for your ONLY number type really was kind of dumb? Having no native datetime was bad? Saddling timezones on the pseudo datetime was a brainfart? Milliseconds only was shortsighted? Horizon was a bad idea too soon? Document databases are the new object databases - forever 5 years away? Aggregates were poorly done? Nobody really knew how to do stationary time series properly (I read through the GitHub issues regarding this and it was laughable that these people called themselves database experts)? and on and on. I'm not saying all of this is true. I'm saying let's be straight and not always blame sales and marketing or dumb consumers or C-level execs or everybody but our own crappy code.
  - _benedict 10y ago
    Having worked for a successful(ish) database vendor, I can say that user stupidity (ignorance) is a major factor in database software success. Literally no users, and almost no employees at the vendors, I would bet (if my experience is not unique) have any idea of the qualities of the software they use/peddle, its semantics or guarantees, or its performance characteristics or how to use it correctly. This makes the technology secondary; what is most important is how well you carve out mindshare. Whether that is even primarily down to "good" marketing is something I doubt. In the modern saturated database market, it is entirely unclear to me how you win sufficient mindshare and trust to obtain a wide enough (paying) userbase. I have no idea if RethinkDB was "good" or not, as I did not take the time to investigate; I have little interest in "document stores". It actually seemed to me they had some pretty solid engineering foundations; the kind of thing that the industry should value highly, but due to poor information is unable to price into their purchasing decision, and as a result is missing in many modern (especially OSS) database offerings today.