6 ms·

To understand what happened to RethinkDB, you want to contrast it with MongoDB. RethinkDB is amazing software and a real breakthrough. And the audience of deep

To understand what happened to RethinkDB, you want to contrast it with MongoDB. RethinkDB is amazing software and a real breakthrough. And the audience of deep thinking people who can really leverage the event model is ... limited. Today. MongoDB is no breakthrough, but there are legions of people who just want to plug something together with PHP or Node. Given what they're doing, it works fine. I sincerely hope Rethink can turn into a vibrant open source project and I'm willing to donate money to that. Given sufficient time, the world will learn to use it. And until then, it will grant superpowers to people willing to invest a little effort to understand and leverage it.

peruvian 10y ago
FWIW I found Rethink easier than Mongo, especially the query language. ReQL is actual JavaScript—Mongo's query language always seemed weird to me. Mongo was "there" first and generated a lot of hype through sales and marketing. For a while and probably still now, a lot of Hackathons at college campuses are sponsored by Mongo and you can usually get a prize for using Mongo in your project. Rethink never marketed themselves too much—it was one of those things you found out about in HN or from another dev. I'm clueless about business stuff so I don't mean to say Rethink should've marketed heavily like Mongo did, but that's definitely a factor. I also think Rethink should've done Horizon earlier and offered paid hosting/deployment for it and Rethink users.
thesmallestcat 10y ago
For those not "in the know," what capability is that? Everything I hear implies a focus on ease of use: Easy replication/distribution, JS API, single number type (float64), usefulness when teaching novices, etc.
- alexbanks 10y ago
  RethinkDB's niche is allowing a service to listen for changes to a dataset. As in, your Node application could listen for published events by Rethink, rather than your Node application long-polling the dataset for changes. "Real Time" data analytics can then be performed.
  - api 10y ago
    Its other niche is easy to deploy replication and sharding that actually works, actually scales, and does not lose data.
    - thesmallestcat 10y ago
      Pretty much anybody can appreciate that, right? Not just the "deep thinking people"?
    - ericd 10y ago
      I've never seen that in any db I've worked with. If that's true, that's pretty huge.
      - williamstein 10y ago
        It is true. It was NOT true a year ago, but it is now. I pushed it hard, Aphyr pushed it hard, and the RethinkDB team worked very hard addressing every issue we found. That's why RethinkDB failing is so tragic.
        api 10y ago
        Yeah it feels like they died right after getting everything right.
        ericd 10y ago
        Damn, I'm simultaneously excited and sad now. I hope it survives as open source so I can use it for my next project.
      - tlarkworthy 10y ago
        Firebase works like that. The polling of databases is a really obvious limitation of existing databases once you see the alternative. (I work at Firebase)
        bjt 10y ago
jdale27 10y ago
"Worse is Better" triumphs again...
a-no-n 10y ago
Disclaimer: I have a bro crush on Ben Horowitz. Exactly, they gave it a good go as a company but their burn rate was likely too high/too soon and differentiation insufficient (whether lack of actual novel features and/or communicating advantages in marketing). For example, a polar opposite of something like Couchbase which is used by giant enterprise shops to move away from Memcache and/or CouchDB. It was also competing in a way Peter Thiel and Paul Graham warn about. Reinventing something without a vital quantum of improvement is like trying to juggle while climbing Half Dome. I hope Rethink lives on as open source and adds MongoDB support. If they can hustle to encourage more people to try it by selling its obvious advantages, they have a slim but nonzero chance of rebooting. Next time, gotta find more paying, alpha customers first and then start building. Then, try VC only after being capital-constrained when hiring/expansion/development is a blocker to realizing imminent profit. New category brands and segment-optimized products are riskier but more likely to be able to set up moats with defensible, competitive value.
- gogopuppygogo 10y ago
  You nailed it with this "try VC only after being capital-constrained when hiring/expansion/development is a blocker to realizing imminent profit". Don't raise money for an idea, raise money for a business that is capital constrained. VC is only one kind of funding you can try to grow with. The best source of funding is revenue.
pan69 10y ago
Just going out on a limb here, and I know neither MongoDB or RethinkDB (nor the companies behind them) very well. But, from what you're saying it almost sounds like that RethinkDB would be a great companion to MongoDB. And if so, that the company behind MongoDB might be a great custodian for RethinkDB.
- davidbanham 10y ago
  That thought fills me with dread. Rethink is well engineered and has a great developer experience. Mongo isn't and doesn't.
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    All these comments are starting to make me feel stupid. I picked mongo for a side project, and it's been really nice so far. I have a hard time imagining how one would use it for a complicated and/or large schema though. I assume that is just my newness to it.
    - __jal 10y ago
      Nope, you have it right. Mongo is a lot of fun to play with out of the box. Once you have nontrivial data models, redundancy and load, not so much.
    - jpgvm 10y ago
      Don't feel bad for not understanding how to make it work for a big project, it just doesn't. You can try make it work for a big project, but at that point you are just implementing database level code in your application. Better to just use something like PostgreSQL. Contrary to popular belief PostgreSQL is actually a better document store than MongoDB via it's jsonb type, operators and GIST/GIN indexing.
  - pan69 10y ago
    I'm not entirely to sure if I understand your comment, however, what I mean is; The company behind MongoDB is a database company so they probably have some sort of affinity and appreciation for a product like RethinkDB, and, they are commercially successful (or at least, it appears to be that way). Just because, hypothetically, MongoDB could be a custodian for RethinkDB don't mean that all of a sudden RethinkDB becomes MongoDB. As Paul pointed out, both solutions seem to be two different products covering two different use cases and audiences and from what I can imagine, they might actually complement each other.
meira 10y ago
MongoDB was much more breakthrough than this little thing called rethinkdb. Hell, people even create the term NoSQL because of it. Maybe the failure of this project came from this dellusional thinking I keep reading in all posts about their failure.
- jpgvm 10y ago
  MongoDB coined the term maybe, along with webscale and a whole bunch of meme. But "NoSQL" atleast as it'd defined has been around forever, it predates SQL because everything before then was trying to work out how to store bits on disk as efficiently as possible before relational theory really found it's way into storage systems and revolutionized things by focussing on modelling. Even putting aside that fact it was a terrible database then, it's a slightly less terrible database now and everything it can do is done better by other databases.
chipotle_coyote 10y ago
I admit I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but RethinkDB was really easy to plug into Node. While we didn't support PHP officially, the PHP RethinkDB driver was maintained by RethinkDB's engineering manager, Daniel Mewes, and it looked pretty solid. When I started at RethinkDB, it was before changefeeds were a thing. I always thought the "killer feature" was, well, ReQL. It had the qualities of an ORM/DB Builder in your native language of choice. There was a poster on the wall that said "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic"; I always thought that was a perfect pitch to the RethinkDB audience. I understand why they canted toward pitching the realtime aspects first and foremost after changefeeds came about, but I thought it had great power even if you weren't focused on realtime/event-driven aspects, and perhaps that should have been emphasized more.
- dkersten 10y ago
  In my opinion rethinkdb is super easy to get going and use. The low touch maintenance is what drew me originally. However, learning to live without transactions takes some rethinking of the approaches taken. It's totally doable but it may not come easy if you're used to transactions in an RDBMS. Of course in today's distributed multi service multi database world, learning to live without transactions is becoming more and more important anyway.
  - lucio 10y ago
    if "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic" then somehow you should be able to get transactions
    - dkersten 10y ago
      You can get transactions, but at a cost. Distributed transactions exist, they're just slow (and network-chatty). RethinkDB decided not to go that direction, I guess.

peruvian 10y ago

FWIW I found Rethink easier than Mongo, especially the query language. ReQL is actual JavaScript—Mongo's query language always seemed weird to me. Mongo was "there" first and generated a lot of hype through sales and marketing. For a while and probably still now, a lot of Hackathons at college campuses are sponsored by Mongo and you can usually get a prize for using Mongo in your project. Rethink never marketed themselves too much—it was one of those things you found out about in HN or from another dev. I'm clueless about business stuff so I don't mean to say Rethink should've marketed heavily like Mongo did, but that's definitely a factor. I also think Rethink should've done Horizon earlier and offered paid hosting/deployment for it and Rethink users.

thesmallestcat 10y ago

For those not "in the know," what capability is that? Everything I hear implies a focus on ease of use: Easy replication/distribution, JS API, single number type (float64), usefulness when teaching novices, etc.

alexbanks 10y ago
RethinkDB's niche is allowing a service to listen for changes to a dataset. As in, your Node application could listen for published events by Rethink, rather than your Node application long-polling the dataset for changes. "Real Time" data analytics can then be performed.
- api 10y ago
  Its other niche is easy to deploy replication and sharding that actually works, actually scales, and does not lose data.
  - thesmallestcat 10y ago
    Pretty much anybody can appreciate that, right? Not just the "deep thinking people"?
  - ericd 10y ago
    I've never seen that in any db I've worked with. If that's true, that's pretty huge.
    - williamstein 10y ago
      It is true. It was NOT true a year ago, but it is now. I pushed it hard, Aphyr pushed it hard, and the RethinkDB team worked very hard addressing every issue we found. That's why RethinkDB failing is so tragic.
      - api 10y ago
        Yeah it feels like they died right after getting everything right.
      - ericd 10y ago
        Damn, I'm simultaneously excited and sad now. I hope it survives as open source so I can use it for my next project.
    - tlarkworthy 10y ago
      Firebase works like that. The polling of databases is a really obvious limitation of existing databases once you see the alternative. (I work at Firebase)
      - bjt 10y ago

jdale27 10y ago

"Worse is Better" triumphs again...

a-no-n 10y ago

Disclaimer: I have a bro crush on Ben Horowitz. Exactly, they gave it a good go as a company but their burn rate was likely too high/too soon and differentiation insufficient (whether lack of actual novel features and/or communicating advantages in marketing). For example, a polar opposite of something like Couchbase which is used by giant enterprise shops to move away from Memcache and/or CouchDB. It was also competing in a way Peter Thiel and Paul Graham warn about. Reinventing something without a vital quantum of improvement is like trying to juggle while climbing Half Dome. I hope Rethink lives on as open source and adds MongoDB support. If they can hustle to encourage more people to try it by selling its obvious advantages, they have a slim but nonzero chance of rebooting. Next time, gotta find more paying, alpha customers first and then start building. Then, try VC only after being capital-constrained when hiring/expansion/development is a blocker to realizing imminent profit. New category brands and segment-optimized products are riskier but more likely to be able to set up moats with defensible, competitive value.

gogopuppygogo 10y ago
You nailed it with this "try VC only after being capital-constrained when hiring/expansion/development is a blocker to realizing imminent profit". Don't raise money for an idea, raise money for a business that is capital constrained. VC is only one kind of funding you can try to grow with. The best source of funding is revenue.

pan69 10y ago

Just going out on a limb here, and I know neither MongoDB or RethinkDB (nor the companies behind them) very well. But, from what you're saying it almost sounds like that RethinkDB would be a great companion to MongoDB. And if so, that the company behind MongoDB might be a great custodian for RethinkDB.

davidbanham 10y ago
That thought fills me with dread. Rethink is well engineered and has a great developer experience. Mongo isn't and doesn't.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  All these comments are starting to make me feel stupid. I picked mongo for a side project, and it's been really nice so far. I have a hard time imagining how one would use it for a complicated and/or large schema though. I assume that is just my newness to it.
  - __jal 10y ago
    Nope, you have it right. Mongo is a lot of fun to play with out of the box. Once you have nontrivial data models, redundancy and load, not so much.
  - jpgvm 10y ago
    Don't feel bad for not understanding how to make it work for a big project, it just doesn't. You can try make it work for a big project, but at that point you are just implementing database level code in your application. Better to just use something like PostgreSQL. Contrary to popular belief PostgreSQL is actually a better document store than MongoDB via it's jsonb type, operators and GIST/GIN indexing.
- pan69 10y ago
  I'm not entirely to sure if I understand your comment, however, what I mean is; The company behind MongoDB is a database company so they probably have some sort of affinity and appreciation for a product like RethinkDB, and, they are commercially successful (or at least, it appears to be that way). Just because, hypothetically, MongoDB could be a custodian for RethinkDB don't mean that all of a sudden RethinkDB becomes MongoDB. As Paul pointed out, both solutions seem to be two different products covering two different use cases and audiences and from what I can imagine, they might actually complement each other.

meira 10y ago

MongoDB was much more breakthrough than this little thing called rethinkdb. Hell, people even create the term NoSQL because of it. Maybe the failure of this project came from this dellusional thinking I keep reading in all posts about their failure.

jpgvm 10y ago
MongoDB coined the term maybe, along with webscale and a whole bunch of meme. But "NoSQL" atleast as it'd defined has been around forever, it predates SQL because everything before then was trying to work out how to store bits on disk as efficiently as possible before relational theory really found it's way into storage systems and revolutionized things by focussing on modelling. Even putting aside that fact it was a terrible database then, it's a slightly less terrible database now and everything it can do is done better by other databases.

chipotle_coyote 10y ago

I admit I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but RethinkDB was really easy to plug into Node. While we didn't support PHP officially, the PHP RethinkDB driver was maintained by RethinkDB's engineering manager, Daniel Mewes, and it looked pretty solid. When I started at RethinkDB, it was before changefeeds were a thing. I always thought the "killer feature" was, well, ReQL. It had the qualities of an ORM/DB Builder in your native language of choice. There was a poster on the wall that said "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic"; I always thought that was a perfect pitch to the RethinkDB audience. I understand why they canted toward pitching the realtime aspects first and foremost after changefeeds came about, but I thought it had great power even if you weren't focused on realtime/event-driven aspects, and perhaps that should have been emphasized more.

dkersten 10y ago
In my opinion rethinkdb is super easy to get going and use. The low touch maintenance is what drew me originally. However, learning to live without transactions takes some rethinking of the approaches taken. It's totally doable but it may not come easy if you're used to transactions in an RDBMS. Of course in today's distributed multi service multi database world, learning to live without transactions is becoming more and more important anyway.
- lucio 10y ago
  if "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic" then somehow you should be able to get transactions
  - dkersten 10y ago
    You can get transactions, but at a cost. Distributed transactions exist, they're just slow (and network-chatty). RethinkDB decided not to go that direction, I guess.