RethinkDB raises an $8M Series A

by coffeemug • 13 years ago

299 126 13 years ago

lincolnq• 13 years ago

Rethinkdb is a really well-designed system. I've been using it (not in production currently) as a better-designed MongoDB with a proper query language. I would recommend checking it out for new projects where a document datastore is appropriate, and to migrate away from a troublesome Mongo.

octix5• 13 years ago

I've been using mongo for a few years now, can you please elaborate more on better designed mongo and troublesome mongo?

boomzilla2• 13 years ago

Three words: JOIN, JOIN, JOIN. For any non-trivial domain, you'll need to join different entity types. For example, a collection of users is fine for user names, (hashed) passwords, last logins, etc. A collection of document is fine for text, fonts, URL. Now what happens if you have multiple users collaborating on multiple documents? Are you going to denormalize the shared documents to user objects, or are you only keeping document IDs in them? If you choose the former, you'll run into inconsistency very quickly. If you choose the latter, you'll need join support, or you have to write the code to do the poor man's join which could be very inefficient.

RethinkDB supports join out of the box.

simonrobb• 13 years ago

This was brought up in a big way in the recent firestorm around Mongo, but the lack of joins precludes it from any use as a relational database (which is fine, since it's not intended as one). However, I've never been able to use Mongo as a large-scale store as a result.

It seems like the addition of joins lends some relational capabilities which in my eyes is very impressive. I'll be watching the advance of this one with interest.

nawitus• 13 years ago

How does Rethinkdb handle replication, multi-master and MVCC? Thath's the main reason to use CouchDB over MongoDB.

pspeter32• 13 years ago

How do CouchDB and RethinkDB compare?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Slava @ rethink here.

RethinkDB supports MVCC out of the box -- you don't have to do anything as a user to get it. (It basically means you can do writes and long reads concurrently without any locking issues).

Sharding and replication in Rethink is similar to Mongo's architecturally, but is much easier in practice. You can shard and replica in Rethink in one click -- check out the 1m highlights video (http://rethinkdb.com/videos/what-is-rethinkdb/) to see how it works. If you have a little more time, take a look at the 10m screencast for more details -- http://rethinkdb.com/screencast/.

pbogdan• 13 years ago

I've been struggling with this one a lot - could someone explain where a document store is a good solution?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Imagine an RDBMS table where many columns are nullable and many rows contain nulls in practice. Dealing with these is really painful in traditional database systems (you don't know how painful until you try a document store).

A document store flips the default. It makes dealing with data that has lots of nullable columns much, much easier. (It also makes dealing with hierarchical data a breeze)

There are lots of details, but this is the gist of it.

baruch• 13 years ago

I'm using it to collect stats from various systems, events and alerts too. It makes it easy to collect new data points and add fields to new events and query things in a consistent way across the entire data set.

When the schema is not rigid and likely to change on a daily basis I prefer a document database over an SQL one. There are probably other use cases as well, this is just my favourite.

codelust5• 13 years ago

One example is a CMS. An article these days is a title, body and 5-10 comments, and whatever other metadata that you would want to present on a page. Don't update the corresponding NoSQL record till there are writes in the RDMBS. Serve from the NoSQL system, with at least another caching layer in front. You get the best of both worlds and just one query instead of many.

jnbiche• 13 years ago

I've been looking at Rethinkdb for an upcoming project that has a decent amount of relational data. Rethinkdb seems a lot different from Mongodb in that it's partially designed to accomodate relational queries. Has that been your experience?

Also, does Rethinkdb have any kind of transactional capabilities?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Does Rethinkdb have any kind of transactional capabilities

You have full ACID on a single document, but not across multiple documents. In this way Rethink is similar to other NoSQL systems (except you can do almost any operation imaginable atomically on a single document in RethinkDB).

amenod• 13 years ago

Nice, can't wait to try it out! Though in my case (single node installations) hot backup missing feature is a deal breaker, so I'll have to wait till RethinkDB supports it. The current workaround (replication, stop the slave, backup, start the slave) is just not good enough for me...

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Hot backup has been available since 1.7. You can learn more about how it works here: http://rethinkdb.com/docs/backup/

Enjoy!

pdog• 13 years ago

Any notable companies using RethinkDB in production?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Slava @ rethink here. There are hundreds of really cool production use cases of RethinkDB that we know of. We'll be publishing a "who's using it" page soon (we have tons of work and haven't gotten around to this bit yet, but will soon).

Note that Rethink is still in beta. Lots of companies already use it in production, but we advise people to test carefully until we ship a long term support (LTS) release. We'll also offer commercial support options then.

octix5• 13 years ago

I like the idea of LTS release.

Btw, how do you know that "Thousands of developers are already building applications backed by RethinkDB;"?

PS: I hope we'll see soon more official drivers...

neumino2• 13 years ago

Any specific driver in your mind?

kclay• 13 years ago

Scala/Java so you can hire/contract me ;)

octix5• 13 years ago

Java in particular... I don't want to use a small community supported driver in production. Which may be the reason that popular frameworks will not release support until there is one.

I just trying to compare with my current stack spring mvc 3, spring data mongodb.

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

How do you know that "Thousands of developers are already building applications backed by RethinkDB;"?

We know in two ways. First, people have told us via GitHub/IRC/e-mail/etc. and Shirts For Stories page (http://www.rethinkdb.com/community/shirts-for-stories/).

Second, the administration UI checks for version updates, which gives us some information about how many developers are using RethinkDB and how long they stuck around.

There is no perfect way to know because there are many sources of imprecise information, but we're quite confident about the overall conclusions of the data.

I hope we'll see soon more official drivers...

We've been trying to keep the surface area of the project low for now. Which specific drivers are you interested in? (we probably won't be able to do anything about it for the next ~6 months or so, but having the info helps enormously)

octix5• 13 years ago

The part with update check is interesting.

Java! My current stack is spring mvc 3, spring-data-mongodb. It's not perfect, but at least I don't have to hack my way into basic db ops...

SanderMak• 13 years ago

I'd like to second the call for an official Java(/Scala) driver. Would be real helpful to push RethinkDB forward in the circles I'm in.

infocollector• 13 years ago

Does anyone know at what percentage equity was this raised?

petesoder• 13 years ago

Very cool. Congrats, guys! This was a great talk - http://www.hakkalabs.co/articles/how-rethinkdb-works/

jops• 13 years ago

I'm looking forward to the LTS release so I can feel more comfortable using it in a production app.

A slight aside, but I spotted this (currently broken) integration of RethinkDB and Meteor the other day and wanted to share. It does away with the long poll Meteor is doing on Mongo. (I have no involvement in this project at all.)

https://github.com/tuhinc/rethink-livedata

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLu_ROrA0YY

jggonz• 13 years ago

Oh, I was just reading an article about this (http://www.hackreactor.com/blog/Building-a-RethinkDB-Module-...) and I'm sad to hear it's currently broken. I really hope the meteor guys add support for something better than Mongo. I've already ran into scaling issues on a meteor app I use to gather analytic information. You really need to implement sharding very early on with MongoDB in order to keep memory use and locking issues under control. To me that means a large investment in hardware and infrastructure just for a personal project.

geoffschmidt• 13 years ago

Meteor core dev here! We are super excited about Rethink and Slava and I have been talking for a while about an official integration. We scoped multidatabase support out of the upcoming Meteor 1.0 release just to get it out the door faster -- we need to support people using Meteor in production with frozen APIs, and we need to do it yesterday -- but support for Rethink is something I'm very interested in exploring in 2014.

As for the polling on Mongo, you'll love what Meteor is shipping this week. Meteor now by default connects to Mongo as a replication slave and slurps up the replication log to drive your realtime queries.

ludwigvan• 13 years ago

Excellent news! Came here to see if anyone is doing meteor-rethink integration, and saw this. It will be a killer combo. Keep up the good work.

prottmann• 13 years ago

++ for multidatabase support.

100k• 13 years ago

Congrats to Slava and the RethinkDB team. I'm really looking forward to your continued progress.

benjaminwootton• 13 years ago

It amazes me that there is so much money floating around to fund these niche open source NoSQL products.

(Not that I'm not a fan of RethinkDB. I've been playing with it since one of the earliest released builds and find it a really lightweight nice database to use.)

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

Well, they're funding on the belief that one of them isn't going to remain niche.

codelust5• 13 years ago

Used to think the same way about most investing till I figured out better.

I do not know the specifics of this particular deal, nor have I used the product, but I hope the points are of going to be some use.

Let us look at it this way. Assume there are 200 funds out there who can do a series A of this size. That would naturally mean that not every fund is going to be either a leader or someone who spots new trends (there are not enough trends out there). Naturally, a lot of them have to invest in deals in other companies in a hot sector.

A lot of investment is momentum-driven and momentum is often driven by the narrative. You have to remember that as long as a successful exit happens, the fund winds up with a good deal irrespective of whether the public (IPO) or the acquiring company (M&A) eventually profits from it. NoSQL has that momentum at the moment.

A healthy start-up ecosystem can easily support more than a handful of companies in a single domain. Once the narrative for the domain really picks up, even the not-so-great ones (again, I have no clue about RethinkDB) stand a good chance of being acquired as long as there is decent enough traction and the sector is so hot that there is pressure on the GPs to make a play in it.

The later they get into the game, the pricier the ticket becomes, but you get lesser risk too.

And all of this is perfectly OK and fair.

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Slava @ Rethink here.

This is a really good breakdown. I can't read our investors's minds, but I'm pretty sure this would be a worst case scenario for them. It's certainly not why we're doing Rethink -- if we thought it would be a #5 company in the space, we'd pack up and do something else (life's too short).

The NoSQL market is reminiscent of "horseless carriages" -- as long as you define a technology by an absence of something, you know you're early in the game. Databases are a fundamental part of the technology stack, and they tend to easily stick around for 20-30 years. We think we can build a long-term open source company that will stick around for that long (incidentally, that's why we take conventions in ReQL so seriously -- we imagine millions of programmers fifteen years from now cursing at us for a stupid naming convention).

It's not hard to imagine groundbreaking features in NoSQL products that nobody is shipping. That's why RethinkDB exists, and we think we won't be a niche product for long.

teleclimber• 13 years ago

I was thinking about investments the other day (I'm also trying to wrap my brain around this topic). I think it comes down to this:

An investment happens when the investor thinks the company will be worth more to another investor in the future.

That's basically it (and it's basically what you said). The second investor in the sentence above could be another VC, a buyer (M&A), or the stock market (IPO).

qwerta• 13 years ago

RethinkDB is credible (perhaps major) competitor for MongoDB valuated at $1.2B. So this founding seems very reasonable.

There is actually real shortage of innovative databases. For example Redis was released just a few years ago, but all ingredients were here for decades.

It takes years to develop, quality demands are very high and takes long time to build reputation to get enterprise users. Also experienced people are scarce and get 'hired away' by big guys. Very hard field for start-up.

mbesto• 13 years ago

There's some serious money to be had in this market. I would actually argue this a very low amount.

http://www.marketresearchmedia.com/?p=568

http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Big_Data_Database_Revenue_and_Mark...

codelust5• 13 years ago

Thanks, there are some good numbers to chew on there, though, I am always skeptical about projects, thanks to IDC/Garntner.

From the little I have seen of NoSQL, I like it as a niche use-case DB, not entirely divorced from a RDMBS. Thus, not surprised it has the potential to grow like crazy.

newtonocean• 13 years ago

Congrats to Slava, Mike and the RethinkDB team.

zzzaim2• 13 years ago

Been trying RethinkDB on and off and really like the query language. Does anybody know if there are any RethinkDB hosting/DBaaS services out there? Sysadmin/devops is not my forte, and with LTS coming, I hope companies like MongoHQ/MongoLab/IrisCouch for RethinkDB start to prop up.

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Have you tried www.rethinkdbcloud.com ?

pspeter32• 13 years ago

Is that hosted by RethinkDB or another company?

zzzaim2• 13 years ago

I think I stumbled upon it before, looks rough around the edges and very early preview/beta so I kinda passed on it. Will revisit it soon.

gsibble• 13 years ago

Congrats to Rethink! Really glad to see such a fascinating product get the funding it deserves!

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Congratulations, can't wait for 2.0!

leokun• 13 years ago

This is so awesome. I have been excited about RethinkDB and a real mongodb alternative and was just hesitating based on RethinkDb's ability to last. But now I know you will last. Just awesome. I'm going to start using Rethinkdb on my next project.

mjhea04• 13 years ago

RethinkDB is awesome. I have a stealth project which uses RethinkDB in the backend. I moved it over from Mongo over the weekend. It will be revealed soon. But I'm working with about 100 million records. Currently testing it with node, slamming it with thousand of concurrent requests.

Also, I just started a blog series on Rethink. http://www.realpython.com/blog/python/rethink-flask-a-simple...

Next up will be performance testing.

Congrats, RethinkDB.

dsco• 13 years ago

I'm doing the same thing, launching a service built on RethinkDB and Flask within the next week. I recommend giving Rethink a go if you're contemplating an easy to setup and easy to deploy (AWS supports them) database solution. It also helps that the community behind Rethink are a friendly bunch and the documentation is steadily growing.

I've barely scratched the surface of Rethink in terms of functionality and features; but I definitely see a market for it as a competent and approachable database for people who want something that 'just works'.

fourstar2• 13 years ago

How much code had you written with Mongo before? What were your major pain points in switching?

mjhea04• 13 years ago

I've been using mongo for about a year.

The only pain points are that the API documentation is somewhat confusing. But they still haven't really launched so I expect that the documentation will be updated with better examples soon.

j1z0• 13 years ago

Your post on flask and rethinkdb is great. Very helpful indeed.

mjhea04• 13 years ago

thanks! what would you like to see in the second post?

hatchoo2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the post on Flask and Rethink. I am starting a side project using these two and it is always good to come across helpful resources like yours.

embwbam2• 13 years ago

Congrats! Using RethinkDB on several projects. I love the web interface, I love the query language, I love the features. Keep it up!

wissler2• 13 years ago

What is their revenue model?

orthecreedence• 13 years ago

Build database, sell support. Like any other open-source DB. Or Riak, for instance, charges for site-to-site replication. Generally if you have an open-source project many people are using, you can make money with it.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

RavenDb actually sells the actual product so you need to pay every month for it.

wissler2• 13 years ago

OK, this explains part of their plan:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/rethinkdb-grabs-8m-to-show...

cheez• 13 years ago

Coffeemug, I remember you on IRC in #weblocks. Good stuff, hope you took some off the table.

AHconsidered2• 13 years ago

What are the pros or cons of using RethinkDB versus say Cassandra?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Here is a very short summary.

RethinkDB is much easier to set up and operate, has a much more powerful query language, and is much friendlier for application developers.

Cassandra supports high write availability in case of network partitions. RethinkDB does not. The flipside of that is that you (as an app developer) have to deal with conflicts in Cassandra which makes writing applications much more difficult.

If you need high write availability in case of network partitioning, go with Cassandra or Riak. If you don't, go with RethinkDB or MongoDB.

pkolaczk• 13 years ago

Much easier to set up? What can be much easier than unpacking an archive and running a script to start a node?

IMHO the main difference is data model. RethinkDB is a document store, Cassandra is a wide-table store. As of the query language I agree, but this is caused by Cassandra never including anything that would not scale out.

AHconsidered2• 13 years ago

great explanation. thank you!

ozgune• 13 years ago

Congrats to the RethinkDB team! These guys rock, and I'm looking forward to their future releases.

hardwaresofton• 13 years ago

Super excited for the rethinkdb team. I absolutely love their database and am currently trying to stop using it for everything.

Super helpful on IRC (I've been in there multiple times for help with small problems), seems like an overall awesome team

old-gregg• 13 years ago

If you're an ambitious engineer thinking about joining a start-up, this is your chance to be smart about this.

RethinkDB team is the nicest possible group of people one can hope to work with in Bay Area. They have a great combination of often mutually exclusive things: hacker-friendly business model (no ads, tech for cash), aggressiveness and tech-savviness of founders, yet they're humble, honest and nice.

And the product works, well-liked, serving an exploding market, so the probability of failure is quite low by a typical start-up standards.

This is very rare. Make a move.

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

We are aggressively hiring. Most job descriptions aren't up yet, but will be posted in the next few days. Here is a quick list of high priority positions:

  * Reliability engineer
    Skills:
      - Good working knowledge of Bash and Python
      - Good working knoweldge of C and/or C++
      - Patience
    Responsibilities:
      - Automate testing and benchmarking infrastructure
      - Make sure long tests/benchmarks reliably run
      - Get to the bottom of stability/performance problems, and
        work with the engineering team to fix them
    More info: http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/reliability/

  * Technical writer/developer advocate
    Skills:
      - Basic programming ability in at least two of ruby/python/javascript
      - Good command of english language, style, tone, etc.
      - Ability to explain complex ideas in simple ways in written form
    Responsibilities:
      - Improve API documentation, guides, and tutorials
      - Help support users and bring their concerns back into the product

  * Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, Javascript/Node experts
    Skills:
      - Deep understanding of one of the above stacks (you should
        be able to hack on core Rails/Django/Node, know the
        conventions, and respect the community)
    Responsibilities:
      - Write software to make RethinkDB the absolute best possible
        experience for your respective stack
      - Then tell the community about it

  * Visual designer
    Skills:
      - Produce beautiful web designs and illustrations
      - Mastery of Adobe Creative Suite
      - Mastery with a tablet and stylus
      - Exhibit creative taste
    Responsibilities (we take visual design and user experience extremely seriously):
      - Design user interfaces
      - Help rebrand our website for commercial / community versions
      - Incorporate illustration and a unique visual style into our brand
      - Creative one-off projects (logo, design t-shirts, marketing
        materials, postcards, packaging, generally make things
        beautiful)

Email jobs@rethinkdb.com -- we'd love to hear from you.

john2x2• 13 years ago

Is it weird that I find the Technical writer/developer advocate position fun?

apaitch• 13 years ago

I don't seem like a good fit for any of these positions (Java/C++ engineer >.<), but I'd love to learn more about database internals and how things work and how to make them better. Is there much to do in that area, or is it pretty much complete? Should I just pick a bug and try to fix it, or is there some process to follow >.<

rullopat• 13 years ago

Is it possible to work remotely on any of this positions?

jayhuang• 13 years ago

I just recently had the opportunity to speak with Slava and Michael after one of my posts hit the front page of HackerNews. They are definitely nice people, I enjoyed speaking with them.

I am no expert on databases, so I don't have much to say on that front, but the admin UI for RethinkDB is definitely beyond anything I've seen for databases before. I know that's also something they value tremendously and I'm very happy to see them doing well.

Keep up the great work!

shiloa2• 13 years ago

I tried to find the restrictions/performance costs of storing and accessing medium to large blobs of text in rethinkdb store (say, for a simple web crawler), but couldn't find docs related to that. Is there a size restriction or some other insights from you rethinkdb users or developers out there?

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

A blob is generally restricted to 10MB. We haven't published performance data thus far as we're still working on improving performance. If you try Rethink and run into problems, please let us know -- we'd love to fix them!

shiloa2• 13 years ago

Good to know - thanks and best of luck to you guys!

dpweb3• 13 years ago

Read this article, installed and started messing w/it.. Got any stats or insight how this holds up in a real prod environment?

A very crude measurement - I just threw it on a box that I'm 70ms away from, I'm getting insert responses back in 90ms, on Mongo which I HATED (the "old" query language I was trying to understand.. a while back it was thought for just a moment we could get by without the relational algebra) - I was about 200ms - so far so good, but how much can I hammer a particular node?

Looks to be using ~20MB ram on the svr process, works for me..

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

We haven't been publishing benchmarks yet because it's hard to do a good, scientifically sound job. Different hardware, different setups, different conditions make things really difficult.

If you run into any performance issues, please let us know, we'd love to fix them!

dpweb3• 13 years ago

Congrats on the deal. It is some cool tech.

mutex0073• 13 years ago

Just curious, how many indexes were on the structure you were inserting? Also, i am assuming 90ms per structure, if that is correct, then that is equal to 11 inserts per second which is unfortunately very slow..

coffeemug25• 13 years ago

Also, i am assuming 90ms per structure, if that is correct, then that is equal to 11 inserts per second which is unfortunately very slow..

You can't quite divide like that. In Rethink

  r.table('users').insert({ 'name': 'Bob' })
  r.table('users').insert({ 'name': 'Jim' })

is much slower than the equivalent batched insert

  r.table('users').insert([{ 'name': 'Bob' },
                           { 'name': 'Jim' }])

The latter isn't subject to network round trips and can batch disk writes, drastically increasing performance relative to multiple individual writes. You can see a similar effect in most other database systems.

There other nuances to this -- the complexity of measuring things properly is why we haven't published benchmarks to date. Check out this doc on insert performance for more details: http://rethinkdb.com/docs/troubleshooting/#my-insert-queries...

deepdiver16• 13 years ago

Congrats guys! Well deserved.

I have been using RethinkDB over the last month in a new project. If you know that a document store is the right solution for you, take a look at RethinkDB. I evaluated it against some of its competitors, and I must say that I was really amazed at the deep engineering thinking that is going into RethinkDB. The ease and power of its programming model (use of AST/lamda functions and like abstractions are awesome), and attention to ease of deployment and manageability (great UI!) is unparalled in like products. RethinkDb is a young product for sure, but one with a very bright potential. In addition, being well funded should help alleviate fears and hopefully help it further gain traction.

Best of luck!

oblio• 13 years ago

Good luck, and your first page is golden:

    joe@alchemist~$ rethinkdb
    joe@clockwerk~$ rethinkdb -j alchemist:29015

Just guessing, but joe is probably a Dota fan :)

alessioalex• 13 years ago

There are two things that bother me about the Node.js driver. The first is that it doesn't have its own repository, you have to go to https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/tree/next/drivers/jav... The second one is that it's written in CoffeeScript. That may have been a good idea at the beginning, but if you want to have more traction and more developers looking into the source code I think you should 'translate' it into raw JS.

sourc3• 13 years ago

Having met Slava a couple years ago (which seems like a long time ago) in our office, he is one of wicked smart folks around. Congratulations! Looking forward to the evolution of RethinkDB.

or-else• 13 years ago

I wonder if the low limits on the number of databases and tables will be fixed in 1.12.

I've seen issue 1648 closed for 1.12 and issue 97 to be completed. Are these two enough to fix the limits?

Will it be possibly to have, say 100K tables in a single database? In 1000 databases? Is it possible to have 10K databases?

I've read @cofeemug's explanation that a table is a heavyweight object requiring a few megs of disk space. But that's just a few TBs for 100K tables which is perfectly fine for a 32 node cluster.

Also, it would be great of you could make a page like Mongos' "Limits and Thresholds". I understand that you have lots of other things to do but that one is key in making a decision to use Rethink vs other options.

RethinkDB raises an $8M Series A

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