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Coffeemug: there's one other thing you missed in the postmortem. The early marketing (1st year) for RethinkDB was all about optimizing for SSD storage. Since

Coffeemug: there's one other thing you missed in the postmortem. The early marketing (1st year) for RethinkDB was all about optimizing for SSD storage. Since this was largely nonsense, database consultants like me (who were in a position to push technically correct solutions) read about it, and dismissed RethinkDB from our thoughts forever. I keep up pretty well with the OSS DB field, and didn't realize what you were really trying to build until five years later. With the number of NoSQL and NewSQL DBs entering the market in 2007-2010, I simply didn't have time to re-evaluate any of them. So that's an other "take-home" from the post-mortem: be careful about your "first impression" on the market, because it can be really hard to change.

jhchen 10y ago
Why is optimizing for SSDs nonsense? Empirically this seems correct since RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this but curious about the technical explanation.
- Plugawy 10y ago
  coffeemug explained it himself in a podcast where he was interviewed about Rethinkdb (I don't remember the name of the podcast). Basically it boiled down to the fact that all existing databases (at that time) could be tuned with very little effort to take advantage of SSDs so that differentiating factor flew through the window
  - joshberkus 10y ago
    Exactly.
- dkersten 10y ago
  RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this I believe the storage backend remained largely the same (ie current RethinkDB, IIRC, is still optimised for SSD). Maybe I'm mistaken.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    It's the same storage backend (well, modified quite a bit) and optimizing for SSD's isn't really the goal anymore, especially since things are now stored in a file and not the whole block device, and O_DIRECT is turned off.
zubairq 10y ago
I agree, i thought of rethink as a ssd product too and I only started using it when I read the postmortem

jhchen 10y ago

Why is optimizing for SSDs nonsense? Empirically this seems correct since RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this but curious about the technical explanation.

Plugawy 10y ago
coffeemug explained it himself in a podcast where he was interviewed about Rethinkdb (I don't remember the name of the podcast). Basically it boiled down to the fact that all existing databases (at that time) could be tuned with very little effort to take advantage of SSDs so that differentiating factor flew through the window
- joshberkus 10y ago
  Exactly.
dkersten 10y ago
RethinkDB themselves pivoted away from this I believe the storage backend remained largely the same (ie current RethinkDB, IIRC, is still optimised for SSD). Maybe I'm mistaken.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  It's the same storage backend (well, modified quite a bit) and optimizing for SSD's isn't really the goal anymore, especially since things are now stored in a file and not the whole block device, and O_DIRECT is turned off.

zubairq 10y ago

I agree, i thought of rethink as a ssd product too and I only started using it when I read the postmortem