RethinkDB is shutting down

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&#x27;m really bummed that it didn&#x27;t work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort.<p>I&#x27;m also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we&#x27;ve gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Rethinks -- and shared some of our plans with them and gotten their feedback -- we&#x27;ve become pretty convinced that we can build some excellent products together in the future. I&#x27;m looking forward to learning from all of them.<p>[1] (And, for me, even before Stripe -- I started learning Haskell with Slava&#x27;s Lisp-interpreter-in-Haskell tutorial back in 2006... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defmacro.org&#x2F;ramblings&#x2F;lisp-in-haskell.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defmacro.org&#x2F;ramblings&#x2F;lisp-in-haskell.html</a>)

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).<p>This isn&#x27;t meant to be harsh, but these are times to learn, not simply pat each other on the back.

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.<p>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.<p>In short, RethinkDB is a very solid piece of software that does well where (many) other NoSQLs fall short, that is:<p><pre><code> * 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! </code></pre> Now, what could have they done differently to stay afloat? What avenues do we have to fund fund such great projects, whose <i>point</i> 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&#x27;t deliver, and this is in part thanks to their open development processes)

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.<p>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.<p>In two or three years I think they would be making money, I think this is a failure of capitalism or imagination our HN&#x2F;SV community.<p>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 ]

Wow. I was seriously rooting for them. I&#x27;m looking forward to Slava&#x27;s posts about their challenges on the business side. There&#x27;s a part of me that&#x27;s angry that MongoDB - which some would say has made an objectively worse product - has succeeded.<p>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.

I hope this isn&#x27;t true. Having worked at&#x2F;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.<p>This was real technology! I&#x27;m truly sad that the environment is such that great work like this can&#x27;t continue to be funded.<p>Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation, caring about the fundamentals, and for the incrediblly snazzy admin panel.

Very sad to hear, but hopefully the software will continue to be developed in an open source format.<p>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).

This is honestly quite depressing for me to hear. I&#x27;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.<p>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.

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

Really sad to hear this. I always had a ton of respect for you guys and your commitment to solid technology. (I mean y&#x27;all even passed Aphyr&#x27;s Jepsen tests out of the gate [1]) You&#x27;ve also always paid a great deal of attention to interface, both in your query language and in administration.<p>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&#x27;all would be better off for it. I&#x27;m sorry that didn&#x27;t wind up being the case, at least as far as your company is concerned.<p>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 :-&#x2F;<p>But I&#x27;m happy for y&#x27;all that you wound up finding a great place you can all work together. Best of luck!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5</a>

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&#x27;t even want to use an ORM(for me at least, others may disagree).<p>Sad day to me, but as an open source tech, I hope and trust it will continue to live on.<p>It sounds like the company landed at Stripe. Good for them. Glad they weren&#x27;t left out in the cold.<p>Thank you all very much for your hard work. In my short period of time I have had using RethinkDB, it&#x27;s been a pleasure to work with.

I&#x27;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&#x27;ve particularly admired. I&#x27;m relieved that the team has a new home though and it&#x27;s fantastic that a company that has similar traits is the destination - props to Stripe and the RethinkDB management team for making this happen.<p>I hope to see RethinkDB to live on in the OS community.

I used Slava&#x27;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).<p>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&#x27;s done. Here&#x27;s to hoping that RethinkDB finds a way to continue.

Slava is one of the smartest people I&#x27;ve met (and I&#x27;m sure the rest of the team follows suite) - it&#x27;s indeed sad that the RethinkDB company is no more.<p>I feel we&#x27;re at a stage where some of the key technologies&#x2F;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x2F;innovations.

&gt; We’re excited that the members of our engineering team will be joining Stripe<p>So is this one of Stripe&#x27;s BYOT hires?

This is very sad. RethinkDB is my favourite database engine of all time.<p>I have huge respect for the RethinkDB team - They&#x27;ve put the product above everything else and they&#x27;ve made it accessible to as many developers as possible by making it open source.<p>I think that in spite of this announcement, I will likely continue to use RethinkDB.

I recognize there&#x27;s hundreds of different factors that played a role in the story of RethinkDB and its relatively poor adoption. I&#x27;d like to touch on one specific point (probably far from the most important one) - the name.<p>I think you guys introduced friction <i>very</i> 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 &quot;yet another &#x27;revolutionary&#x27; database that claims to be different and then does the same thing, but dropping some crucial functionality&quot; (for which I primarily blame MongoDB), &quot;RethinkDB&quot; can be considered a bit of a sardonic name. It can also read as &quot;we need to reject the notions other databases are built on and rethink it all&quot;, which to more conservative devs can feel as an attack on decades of thought and design around their beloved MySQL and PostgreSQL.<p>Basically, I think this name might actively discourage developers from adopting your db or at least playing around with it.

Per Crunchbase:<p><pre><code> Dec, 2013 $8M &#x2F; Series A2 Sep, 2011 $3M &#x2F; Series A Apr, 2010 $1.2M &#x2F; Seed Jun, 2009 undisclosed amount &#x2F; Seed </code></pre> Did the company have any revenue or was that the only money the company had to run on?<p>Assuming that info is correct, that&#x27;s pretty slim for building a &quot;hard tech&quot; type of company. Building a database (from scratch no less) is a lot of up front work. Even after it&#x27;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.

If RethinkDB is really better than Mongo then where is the blog post about it?<p>Where are all the scaffolding tools? The examples?<p>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.

RethinkDB was simply too good to be true. I&#x27;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&#x27;m a bit sad they couldn&#x27;t find a viable business I know they are young and ambitions, we will hear from them.<p>Go Slava!

For people mourning the loss of rethinkDB, and who are interested in alternative document based NoSQL DBs under development, please checkout ArangoDB. It&#x27;s my favorite NoSQL database. I have no affiliation with them.<p>Beautiful query language called AQL, and graphing support (multi-model) baked in.

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

Does anyone have experience with Postgres&#x27; pubsub[1] as a means for realtime apps?<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;9.6&#x2F;static&#x2F;sql-notify.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;9.6&#x2F;static&#x2F;sql-notify.html</a>

I&#x27;d fund Slava and Mike again in a second. - Paul Graham on twitter

Rethinkdb is great software that was really designed with technological goals, one after the other, in mind. I&#x27;m a bit surprised to see the company shutting down. I mean, in some way, it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;complexity.

Holy shit, my worst nightmare is realized. I LOVE RethinkDB, I use it for EVERYTHING. It has everything I&#x27;ve ever wanted in a database. Relational documents, realtime feeds. Sadness. Someone better be picking up from where they left off.

Interesting, I expected ArangoDB close shop before RethinkDB.<p>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

Mike has been one of the most genuine and helpful people I&#x27;ve met - always offering to lend an ear or offer suggestions and feedback. It must be really difficult to stop doing something that&#x27;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.

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.<p>Also having followed Slava for a sometime, nothing but respect and admiration for him!

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&#x2F;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&#x27;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!

A while ago, I heard how good RethinkDB is and tried to check it out and found this page.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rethinkdb.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sql-to-reql&#x2F;javascript&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rethinkdb.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sql-to-reql&#x2F;javascript&#x2F;</a><p>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.<p>For anyone who switched from SQL, I&#x27;d like to know how it felt to write RethinkDB queries. Did they start to feel fluent later on?

I would be very interested hearing @coffeemug&#x27;s views on the tension between building a business and building an open source product. (Those I know who have done this range from &quot;never again&quot; to &quot;lost a fortune in sales&quot;)

I wish RethinkDB had published a performance benchmark against Hadoop. It&#x27;d be enough to show the world how ahead of its times RethinkDB is.<p>I also wish I knew what RethinkDB&#x27;s investors are thinking.

This is heartbreaking. I have used it for a couple of different projects and it&#x27;s just a dream to work with.

I think I&#x27;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 &quot;soon, not yet&quot;, and now &quot;not yet&quot; is never unless the people who want it step up.

What was RethinkDB&#x27;s business model and why didn&#x27;t it work?

This is really sad. RethinkDB is an amazing product.

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?

This is sad - Was planning on moving from Postgres to Rethink as our plan once we start to hit scalability limits &#x2F; needing to shard. I guess we will see how the open source efforts go.

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

While RethinkDB looks amazing I&#x27;m glad I didn&#x27;t listen to the people here demanding me to switch from MongoDB. In the future I will just stick with what works.

Their chance of surviving would have increased dramatically if users could install rethinkdb as addon on Heroku.<p>Availability as a service was an issue, the compose deal did not work well for me, as my stuff was hosted on heroku.<p>Anyway, rethinkdb is probably the most awesome database I&#x27;ve tried.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;birkir&#x2F;react-starter-kit-rdb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;birkir&#x2F;react-starter-kit-rdb</a>

RethinkDB fits into the category of products i love but do not use because i do not want to manage the underlying servers. I&#x27;ve moved to Firebase and other &#x27;services&#x27; on the Google, AWS clouds.<p>Given that this is the way many of us are operating (i.e. &#x27;moving to the cloud&#x27;), i wonder what the state of open source software is going to be in the coming years ...

Quite a sad development. I always thought they would have found more success if they had adopted MongoDB&#x27;s API (or similar).

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

As a former employee at Rethink, I&#x27;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!

Never used RethinkDB, but this is the first time I&#x27;ve seen an announcement this written as &quot;we are shutting down, the team is moving to Stripe&quot; rather than &quot;We&#x27;ve been acquired by Stripe! Nothing will change except our product will stop working in 30 days&quot;<p>Much respect for the no-BS announcement.

Why is there no &quot;Pricing&quot; section on their website? how were they making money? (if any)

RethinkDB is an amazing product. I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m sad that all that excellent engineering hasn&#x27;t translated into a profitable business model. Part of me wants to suggest you make a donation campaign, and I&#x27;d be happy to become a regular donor. But it&#x27;s understandable and respectable that you guys want to move on to other ventures.<p>I&#x27;ve also used Stripe&#x27;s API and their systems are also very good. I&#x27;m glad to hear you&#x27;ll find a place with another solid engineering team and I wish you guys all the best.

This is very sad to hear this looked like a real product.<p>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.

I have tinkered with RethinkDB a lot recently. It&#x27;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&#x27;s concurrent model can support really powerful and highly scalable real-time apps.<p>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?

Since our startup is build entirely on Tornado + RethinkDB + Emberjs + Python , this is a huge blow.<p>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.<p>Also Stripe and Compose.io step up , to stand with RethinkDB .<p>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 .

It is sad to see that making a living from development tools is becoming less and less an option.<p>Kudos to the RethinkDB team for trying, and giving us a very useful DB.

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

I&#x27;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&#x27;s sad to imagine the momentum they had created fizzling out ... i would&#x27;ve liked to have seen what they would have came up with over the next couple of years ...

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&#x27;ll see where MongoDB ends up but they have the advantage that a support contract business model works when your product needs support.

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

To be clear: As part of shutting down, you guys found new jobs as you could for employees? That&#x27;s rad!

I&#x27;ve been working on a Clojure RethinkDB driver for about a year now, and I&#x27;ve always been incredibly impressed with the Rethink team. Their openness, friendliness, and helpfulness when asking questions has always been outstanding. You&#x27;ll be sorely missed all.

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!

This is the most sad I&#x27;ve ever been for a software project folding. Good luck to the team.

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?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2cfc76a754ede73d039884924b7c6ae91843ac6b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;rethinkdb&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2cfc76a754ede7...</a> :(

Wow, I&#x27;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.

Core tech products are hard to sell. With so many passengers on big data boat - MemSQL &#x2F; VoltDB &#x2F; Postgres &#x2F; DataStax &#x2F; DataBricks &#x2F; Cloudera &#x2F; Horton many more.<p>Your sales force strength becomes critical.<p>Waiting for insider insights.

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.

Just wanted to say good luck with everything to the team, and especially to neumino - you&#x27;ve personally helped me years ago on freenode writing some long ReQL queries when I first started experimenting with Rethink. :)

I don&#x27;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.

Ive been teaching my siblings programming. It took them literally a day to learn rethinkDB.<p>That should say a lot about how amazing RethinkDB is. It&#x27;s unfortunate to see this get shut down as RethinkDB is pretty easy to work with

Looking forward to the more detailed writeups since I&#x27;d love to read why it wasn&#x27;t possible to build a sustainable company around such an excellent product.<p>Good move by Stripe to pick up these fantastic engineers.

I&#x27;m not familiar with RethinkDB - what was their monetization strategy?

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.

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

Sad news, but I Gotta Believe!

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

Looking at their website, they are being used be: * Nasa * Jive * wise.io, mediafly etc<p>Just another confirmation that many of those companies list all these big well-known &#x27;customers&#x27;.. except they are just lying. Maybe someone in nasa downloaded rethinkdb once and they just listed them there?

This is depressing :&#x2F; I&#x27;m hoping RethinkDB will have an afterlife.

Ok I&#x27;m going to go with: Rethink is dead, long live Rethink!

I loved RethinkDB. I&#x27;m sad.

I&#x27;m glad they are joining Stripe, both of them great and cool companies.

I await to hear postmortem on what went wrong

this seems to me kind of acquihire

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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).<p>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.<p>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:<p>- MongoDB. You won&#x27;t get realtime updates and relational documents if you use MongoDB compared to RethinkDB.<p>- MySQL&#x2F;Postgres. Rethink&#x27;s awesome ReQL query language is a joy to work with compared to standard SQL. Without Rethink, you&#x27;ll be missing document storage and live queries.<p>- 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.<p>- Redis. RethinkDB still has amazing speed and performance, but offers so much more than Redis by itself can.<p>- Hadoop. I know less here, but I&#x27;ve heard that RethinkDB has an amazing query optimization engine. Automatically taking your query and sharding it out across the distributed storage system.<p>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&#x27;t let news like this deter you, or else we would have lost gems like FireFox and Blender.<p>Best regards to you guys, you are awesome.

Haven&#x27;t played with it, but everyone about RethinkDB looks positive. Hopefully it will continue to develop in the open source community.<p>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&#x27;d really like to support an open source alternative to Slack.

How long have the Mets fans been doing that hammer cheer?<p>Because it looks eerily similar to another arm swinging chant that another NL East team does.

ugh.

Time to rethink RethinkDB.

:(

People saying they &quot;failed&quot; -- 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&#x27; 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.<p>But they made a badass database that relatively speaking IS very popular. So thats not failing. Thats winning.<p>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.<p>Plus getting acquired by some company like Stripe, realistically, whether there was some big exit or not, is the dream of many people.<p>So given the reality of the startup scene to say they &#x27;failed&#x27; is a joke.