
RethinkDB is shutting down - neumino
https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/
======
pc
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))

~~~
chanux
I secretly (not 'secret' anymore I guess) and irrationally trust Stripe to do
good on RethinkDB.

Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco. Yeah defmarco, that's how I read it for a long
time. I especially love this piece from _defmarco_
[http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html](http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html)

~~~
patates
> Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco

Just another +1 to the "OMG it's him/her?" moments regularly experience while
reading HN. Thanks for mentioning.

------
jnordwick
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.

~~~
vegabook
_> KDB knocks the socks off everything else_

...but the licence is 250k dollars a year so big fail for startups.

~~~
miguelrochefort
That's the salary of a single employee. Surely they can afford a database on
the payroll.

~~~
vidarh
Many early stage startups can't afford even a single salary. By the time
enough cash is on the table to consider those kind of purchasing decisions,
the initial round of architecture decisions have typically been made, and been
cemented into the initial version of the software.

E.g. I've worked on more than one startup where the first angel investment
wasn't on the table before 6-12 months into development, and where that first
round in some cases was below $250k

On top of that you also have the issue of finding someone that knows it, and
the associated staffing risk that comes with that (yes, I'm sure you can
always find someone, but at what price? there are place I can go where I
couldn't throw a stone in any direction without hitting someone that "knows"
Postgres or MySQL or both sufficiently well to be an acceptable tradeoff)

In many startups the tech choices end up being made not just based on what
fits and what is affordable, but also based on what you can find affordable
people to work with (including e.g. co-founders or other people willing to do
initial work for equity) - sometimes that can lead to niche tech getting used.
But far more often it means picking from a small set of the most common
alternatives.

~~~
st3v3r
So then the startup needs to get by with what it's got and earn money until
they can afford it. Just like everyone else does with literally everything
else.

~~~
vidarh
Yes, and that is exactly the point: This means databases like Postgres or
MySQL gets entrenched over options like KDB that costs a lot of even get
started with. By the time they could afford the license, the cost of switching
has risen dramatically.

------
simon_acca
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
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.

~~~
rer
Does RethinkDB not support transactions? I thought it did.

~~~
simon_acca
"RethinkDB operations are never atomic across multiple keys. For this reason,
RethinkDB cannot be considered an ACID database."

source:
[https://rethinkdb.com/docs/consistency/](https://rethinkdb.com/docs/consistency/)

However, certain operations on a single key, like incrementing a counter, are
atomic.

~~~
rer
I wish they had added transactions. It seems like such an important feature.

~~~
fweespeech
ACID correct distributed transactions create very, very painful performance
problem because you have to lock across multiple physical machines separated
by network connection(s).

Or y'know, you just don't do them correctly and accept a substantial rate of
quietly corrupted data.

There isn't really a good option unless you have absurd amounts of money
compared to your transaction volume.

~~~
rer
ACID correct distributed transactions are possible. Google's F1 paper shows
how:
[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/41344.pdf)

Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.

~~~
fweespeech
They are possible but they are not possible to make per formant compared to
the alternative.

Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.

> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query processing. First,
> we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even
> when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.

There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply
because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.

------
jgord
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
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
> _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
> 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.

~~~
erichocean
They're also trying to make the information catalog compatible-ish as well, so
that existing web-style frameworks that parse the information schema to
determine datatypes and whatnot work out of the box.

------
misterbowfinger
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
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
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.

~~~
jwhitlark
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.

------
tbrock
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.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Everyone at RethinkDB was incredible to work with.

 _Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation_

Thank you! (Really. I'm RethinkDB's documentation writer/editor.)

~~~
happertiger
I have always wondered why there isn't a tech company that just does kick ass
documentation for companies. Seems like a small group of people who make kick
butt stuff in this area.

Really, you did have fantastic documentation, as the original said. Kudos.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Thank you. And...hmm. That's an interesting question.

~~~
grantjgordon
The Rethink docs truly are incredible.

Do you have any guides or books you recommend for writing good documentation?
What software did you use to produce Rethink?

Sorry to see Rethink go.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The documentation is all maintained in Markdown and built with Jekyll, so it's
pretty straightforward. There were a few custom Jekyll tags. For writing, I
used the venerable Mac editor BBEdit; obviously any text editor can do a fine
job here, but there are some subtleties in BBEdit I liked. Its "open file by
name" command can open multiple files with the same name at once, for
instance, and its find/replace functionality goes above and beyond the call of
duty.

For books/guides, it's hard to say. Find documentation you like a lot and
think about what makes it good--the organization/taxonomy is really important
to pay attention to, as well as the tone (formal, conversational, weird,
etc.). As shocking as this might be around here, the _Microsoft Manual of
Style_ is useful as a specifically technical guide, and it's good to have a
relative recent edition of the _Chicago Manual of Style_ kicking around as a
reference. And, just being familiar with standard grammar and punctuation
rules is important. A lot of people aren't. (A lot of people who aren't still
think they are.)

~~~
grantjgordon
Hahaha. That is surprising! Thanks for the helpful advice.

------
aeharding
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
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
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?

~~~
apetresc
His point is a little more subtle than that. When you're choosing a database
engine to build your company on, knowing that it's open source provides some
level of guarantee that _someone_ will continue to maintain it if the
company/developer folds, even if that someone is not you.

Therefore, if you're the one building the database, open-sourcing it de-risks
your product to your potential customers, to some extent.

~~~
rtpg
To expand on this point, if you look at Linux development, multiple companies
are contributing to the project! The product exists outside any single
organisation.

Of course closed source products can also be collaborations, but open source +
open development practices can make this a smooth and natural result.

------
haneefmubarak
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
Hi Haneef :D I was one of the peeps you met at OSCON. Hope to see you around
and on Twitter still <3

------
joneholland
A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink
folds.

~~~
guessmyname
I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as
the _perfect_ database engine for their projects. There is even a name for
their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is
kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript
ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months
since now people prefer React-like libraries / frameworks. Besides the
JavaScript community I don't know of any other that enjoys to use MongoDB —
which to be fair it's not that bad for what it offers, but you know — or ships
it by default in bundle installers which are preferred by many young and/or
newbie developers.

~~~
pluma
Don't laugh -- there's now a thing called MERN, which is basically MEAN with
Angular replaced by React.

The entire sell of MongoDB in the Node community seems to be "it speaks
JavaScript and you can store objects in it". Which of course fails to take
into account any of the strengths and weaknesses of MongoDB (in the latter
case especially the lack of cross-collection transactions or fast joins --
which in my experience account for 90% of the problems Node developers face
with MongoDB).

The main reason MongoDB is popular in the Node community is that both reached
peak hype around the same time. So it made perfect sense to bundle both of the
"hottest" technologies together. Except by the point Angular 1 reached peak
hype MongoDB was already facing criticism, so MEAN mostly seems to bask in its
afterglow.

If you had asked me last month, my prediction would have been a
RethinkDB+Node+React (or RethinkDB+Node+Angular2) stack popping up to
challenge MEAN, though the RethinkDB+Node bit seems to have already been
addressed by Rethink's own Horizon.

~~~
chris_wot
Could be worse - might be ANGER - Angular.js + Node.js + Grunt + Elixhir +
RethinkDB. That might even live up to it's name! Though I guess you could
always go full tilt towards insanity and choose MongoDB + Angular.js + Node.js
+ Grunt + Express.js - MANGE.

------
kbd
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)

------
jarrettch
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
Exact same boat - I've based a few new api's with RethinkDB in the background
- hoping it stays alive.

------
GordyMD
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.

------
saikat
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
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.

------
melvinmt
> We’re excited that the members of our engineering team will be joining
> Stripe

So is this one of Stripe's BYOT hires?

~~~
kevinyun
I would be curious to know this as well

------
jondubois
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.

------
wojcikstefan
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
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.

------
koolba
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
Did RethinkDB spend $8M in 3 years?

~~~
koolba
> 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.

------
ronreiter
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.

~~~
sotojuan
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
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.

------
patkai
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!

------
hmexx
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
Calling stored procedures microservices always makes me laugh.

------
andrewl-hn
Loved that they took care of the engineers! Stripe is a great place to work
where their expertise is surely welcomed.

~~~
joekrill
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.

------
mangeletti
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
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
pgbouncer

~~~
orthecreedence
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
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
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

------
laxd
I'd fund Slava and Mike again in a second. - Paul Graham on twitter

------
antirez
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.

------
overcast
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
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
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
You can build the skills, though I respect you may not have the time.

------
k__
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
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__
lol, now I'm anxious and will go back to postgres ;)

------
skndr
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.

------
adharmad
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!

------
sixdimensional
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!

------
h1d
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?

~~~
dkersten
I haven't used RethinkDB in ages, but when I did, I used it exclusively for a
year.

It took a few weeks for ReQL to really sink in, but once it did, I much
preferred it to SQL. As my sibling comment says, its very linear: do this then
this then this then this. It also feels very much like sequence processing in
functional languages (and I was using Clojure at the time, so it really meshed
very well).

I also found it much easier (than SQL, at least in my limited experience) to
reason about performance because I knew what it was doing. Is this looked up
by index? Yes, because that's the command I used.

So, yeah, ReQL actually ended up being one of the things I liked _most_ about
RethinkDB.

~~~
tshannon
Especially the "known performance" bit. One of the things I fight with
constantly in SQL Server is never getting consistent performance from a more
complicated SQL query. The query plan could change from one day to the next if
the plan falls out of cache.

With ReQL you new exactly how indexes were being used, and how the data was
being accessed. No trying to guess what the query optimizer was doing in the
background.

~~~
dkersten
Exactly. I didn't appreciate this as much as I perhaps should have while
working with RethinkDB, but I've been working on optimising SQL queries lately
and... man I wish I were working in ReQL. It really made me appreciate how
easy (compared to SQL) ReQL is to mentally estimate performance.

------
lifeisstillgood
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")

------
rer
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
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.

------
OhSoHumble
This is heartbreaking. I have used it for a couple of different projects and
it's just a dream to work with.

------
JulianMorrison
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.

------
programminggeek
What was RethinkDB's business model and why didn't it work?

~~~
rodrickbrown
Trying to sell opensource software with great documentation.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I knew I should have left out a few verbs on every page!

------
KirinDave
This is really sad. RethinkDB is an amazing product.

------
uptown
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?

~~~
VeXocide
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

------
jordanthoms
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.

------
bhouston
That is sad. We were considering switching to RethinkDB from MongoDB.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Don't write off RethinkDB yet.

~~~
ryan-allen
I hope not, I've always wanted to use it, it seems like a great product!

------
Kiro
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
In my experience RethinkDB "just works" and Mongo didn't.

~~~
Kiro
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
RethinkDB isn't getting scrapped. You're sounding a little dramatic.

------
solidr53
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)

------
samdung
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
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
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
> 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.

------
djsumdog
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.

------
niahmiah
Quite a sad development. I always thought they would have found more success
if they had adopted MongoDB's API (or similar).

~~~
habitue
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
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
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.

------
ginkgotree
This is really so sad. RethinkDB is top notch. Truly a great team.

------
hiphipjorge
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!

------
jeffy
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.

------
sheeshkebab
Why is there no "Pricing" section on their website? how were they making
money? (if any)

~~~
pluma
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
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
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
> 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/)

~~~
pluma
Oh, absolutely. That is why I said "intuition". It doesn't matter what the
license _actually_ means. It only matters that it's a huge red flag that may
prevent people from investigating further.

------
kerkeslager
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.

------
cybrix
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
That's what literally everyone does for changes on mongo, from Meteor to
Firebase. There isn't another way

~~~
kabes
Honestly interested: how do you know Firebase works that way and do you have
any links to more info about how Firebase works?

~~~
habitue
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
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
Ah, ok, I must have misremembered. Apologies

------
baristaGeek
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?

------
v3ss0n
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 .

------
amelius
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.

------
_jezell_
Slava is awesome. Rethink is awesome. Hope Stripe realizes investing in
Rethink dev could pay massive dividends in developer goodwill.

------
breatheoften
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 ...

------
spullara
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.

------
longsien
I love Rethink and Horizon. Are there great risks in continuing to use Rethink
even if development has stopped?

~~~
dimfeld
Probably not. It's all open-source and they're trying to get a development
community going around the project.

------
RangerScience
To be clear: As part of shutting down, you guys found new jobs as you could
for employees? That's rad!

~~~
roel_v
For the engineers, it seems... Were there any other employees?

~~~
RangerScience
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.

------
dantiberian
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.

------
mrcwinn
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!

------
ianwalter
This is the most sad I've ever been for a software project folding. Good luck
to the team.

------
mrbogle
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?

------
ekmartin
[https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commit/2cfc76a754ede7...](https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commit/2cfc76a754ede73d039884924b7c6ae91843ac6b)
:(

------
silasb
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.

------
crudbug
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
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

------
chrischen
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
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...

------
dylz
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. :)

------
desireco42
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.

------
kevindeasis
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

------
kriro
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.

------
jmcgough
I'm not familiar with RethinkDB - what was their monetization strategy?

~~~
williamstein
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
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
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.

~~~
pluma
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.

------
bryanh
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.

------
cdaringe
Best of luck guys! RethinkDB is still #1 to me :). Hopefully this ship keeps
sailing!

------
Suvitruf
Sad news, but I Gotta Believe!

------
doczoidberg
Anyone has insights in firebase? I hope firebase will not get the same
troubles.

------
the_common_man
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?

~~~
timmaxw
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
Sorry, how is this possible? Lots of users. Lots of value. But no money? Makes
no sense.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Consider the price of air.

------
thomaseng
This is depressing :/ I'm hoping RethinkDB will have an afterlife.

------
tehchromic
Ok I'm going to go with: Rethink is dead, long live Rethink!

------
vmware508
I loved RethinkDB. I'm sad.

------
onurozkan
I'm glad they are joining Stripe, both of them great and cool companies.

------
flamedoge
I await to hear postmortem on what went wrong

------
ahmd
this seems to me kind of acquihire

------
skyfantom
Удачи)

------
marknadal
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
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
Watch out for the Braves next year, won 20 of last 30 and 12 of last 14.

------
saiko-chriskun
ugh.

------
wutf
Time to rethink RethinkDB.

------
pinkskip
:(

------
ilaksh
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
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.

