
The Future of RethinkDB - williamstein
https://changelog.com/podcast/266
======
nodesocket
I'm interested in the backchannel and business that happens when a company
that raises multiple millions of dollars shuts down. Do the investors take
over? Do the founders have to pay back investors? Is there any liability
personally by the founders to investors? This is something that is never
really discussed, probably because it gets messy with lawyers.

EDIT: Just heard Mike say that CNCF acquired the ip and assets of RethinkDB
for $20k? That's can't be right? Tiny startups that generate $1k a month in
recurring revenue sell for more than $20K. RethinkDB raised over $12M right?
What am I missing?

~~~
throwaway5752
The transaction was more of a donation. Companies that get bought are because
the technology is strategically important or it is profitable (either business
model scales up, or business functions overlap and you can reduce expenses).
I'd guess that no companies with enough money to pay sufficiently more than
$20K though thought either of those were the case?

~~~
nodesocket
> I'd guess that no companies with enough money to pay sufficiently more than
> $20K though thought either of those were the case?

It seems like an official hosted RethinkDB that included enterprise support
could generate pretty nice MRR revenue and take business from Compose.io
(IBM). Shoot, wish I'd known, $20K for the ip and assets was a steal. Probably
would have been exponentially more to a buyer who wanted to turn it commercial
though.

~~~
throwaway5752
I don't know. Databases are a hard business (see Riak, FoundationDB). Costs
money to add features and fix bugs (and really hard to find qualified folks
that can do that) as well as hosting costs if you offer a service. We'll see
what happens with some other entrants. I would read
[http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-
failed.html](http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html)
regarding DBaaS, too.

~~~
nodesocket
I've read it. Completely agree about RethinkDB specifically, who raised VC
capital on the order of $12M. A cloud hosted solution is a very tough
business, with thin margins when you have dozens of employees, $15-$25k a
month bay area rent, and very high overhead. The numbers don't add up and not
the return investors are looking for.

Though, if you're bootstrapping with your own capital and grow it to something
like $10K or $20K a month in MRR, that's a win. I'm all about bootstrapping
SaaS companies and growing recurring revenue.

------
macawfish
I really enjoy RethinkDB. Partly, that's cause it's the first time I've really
dug into a nosql database, and I'm loving the freedom of it... Being able to
dump stuff straight from a websockets feed straight into the database is
awesome! Also, I like the web interface. It's simple and shows me what I want
to see with regard to performance and storage.

I haven't really gotten much into doing fancy queries or transforms or
streams.

If someone could make a tool that let you use RethinkDB as a (more or less)
direct back end for pandas... That would be killer

~~~
chrisabrams
I do a lot of work with RethinkDB + Pandas. We should talk.

~~~
ccmonnett
I use RDB heavily with some Pandas hanging off the side because we haven't
integrated them well but looking to improve that. You can get in touch with me
if you'd like - I use this handle pretty much everywhere (except reddit ;) ).

------
rishav_sharan
Is there any update on horizon.io?

it's github hasn't received any update in a very long while

~~~
andrewrothman
I'm not sure if the pun was intended, but if not, it would've made an
excellent joke.

~~~
jdoliner
It's almost hard not to make that joke, horizon.io just lends itself to that
so readily.

------
tarr11
What is the primary use case for rethinkdb (vs other databases) ?

~~~
api
We use it here (ZeroTier).

Pros:

\- Very easy and robust clustering (Raft-based, automatic fail-over). This is
huge for us.

\- Streaming change feeds. This one is also huge. Makes any kind of real-time,
reactive, or event driven programming very easy and IMHO is something that
should exist in every database.

\- It's kind of half SQL. It's a NoSQL document store but encourages a
relational design and supports many relational queries.

\- Rational and pretty easy to understand query language. It's much cleaner
than Mongo.

\- Easy to deploy and configure.

\- It passed the Jepsen tests before Mongo did and overall has a solid history
of not losing data.

Cons:

\- It's a CPU hog, at least when compared with PostgreSQL.

\- It's also an I/O hog, though we sponsored some improvements that are
getting merged in the next version that will reduce this and also make table
commit a configurable parameter. You'll be able to have fully and partially
(long flush delay) in-memory tables for highly ephemeral data.

~~~
CodesInChaos
How do you handle the lack of transactions / atomic updates affecting more
than one document?

~~~
api
Our data model generally doesn't require this. We're actually okay with less
guarantees than RethinkDB provides. AFIAK NoSQL stores in general are a bad
choice if you need this. You should use a SQL database.

~~~
manigandham
To be clear, nosql vs sql doesnt mean much - use the right type of database
for the scenario: relational, document, graph, key/value, etc.

They all have various support for transactions with relational usually the
most comprehensive.

------
nailer
Could someone with the time to listen please provide a summary?

~~~
adamb_
Listened to it last week -- The gist is that they've found a new home with the
CNCF & The Linux Foundation, which bought the IP so that they could continue
working on it publicly. Besides the database (which was always open source)
this is especially important for parts of RethinkDB that were meant for
"enterprise-only", which the company was working on internally before they
shutdown. All and all the community support sounds strong, and after listening
I decided to take another look at Rethink for my next project :)

~~~
dankohn1
Small edit: CNCF funded the transaction (to free the IP by relicensing under
Apache-2.0) but the project is hosted by CNCF's parent, The Linux Foundation.

Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF and did the transaction. And, in
case you're wondering, I'm thrilled that the community of people able to take
advantage of the code is growing.

~~~
muramira
Dude, really thank you for your hard work on this. Out of curiosity, how did
you pull it off?

------
saidmasoud
From the transcript, in case anyone was confused:

s/bizzare/bazzar/g

~~~
sant0sk1
Thanks for pointing that out! Our transcriber usually does a great job, but he
doesn't get 'em all right.

The awesome thing is that our transcripts are open source and somebody must've
read your comment, because I just merged a PR fixing this.

[https://github.com/thechangelog/transcripts/pull/13](https://github.com/thechangelog/transcripts/pull/13)

Our site auto-updates the transcripts after a merge, so your comment is now
outdated. :)

~~~
ComodoHacker
That was me, and I've read the transcript. :)

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tbirrell
Thats a lot of text...

Also [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
bjt
I don't think RethinkDB ever intended to unify and replace all existing
databases.

