Clouds over RethinkDB?


    I suspect that few people use the products of this company. Although, at least, their DBMS of the same name is worth attention. On a habr saw a couple of articles in total.

    Unfortunately, the company RethinkDB, developing the database of the same name and the Horizon web-platform, announced the closure. After 7 years of development, due to the inability to organize a sustainable business, the founders were forced to curtail their activities. The RethinkDB DBMS and the Horizon platform are handed over to the community. RethinkDB code is licensed under the AGPLv3 license, and Horizon is licensed under the MIT license.

    A bit about RethinkDB


    RethinkDB is an open source NoSQL database ( sorts on github ), which has a built-in change notification system . Instead of queries to the database for changes, you can "subscribe" to streaming updates, which will eliminate unnecessary queries to the database.

    RethinkDB is a schema-free repository for JSON documents, but it also supports some features of relational databases. RethinkDB also supports clustering, which makes it very easy to expand. You can configure sharding and copying through the built-in web interface. The latest version of RethinkDB also includes an automatic fail-over»For clusters with three or more servers. (Translator's note: the possibility of continuing to work with the database if one of the servers

    crashes is implied .) The query language in RethinkDB, called ReQL, is natively embedded in the code in the language in which you write your application. If, for example, you code in Python, then when writing queries to the database you will use the usual syntax for Python. Each request is made up of functions that the developer puts in a chain to accurately describe the necessary operation.

    Horizon


    Horizon is a service on top of RethinkDB, consisting of their horizon (hz) console utility, authorization and ACL, horizon.js client JS library for working with the database on the client. It will be useful for those who do not want to suffer a lot with the backend (do not want to write it completely by himself).

    RethinkDB closes


    Slava Akhmechet assured that they will continue to work with the community and the projects will be available in the future (including the sites rethinkdb.com and horizon.io ).

    The company was unable to build a sustainable business, which is why it is closing, judging by the words of Slava Akhmechet:
    We worked very hard to make Rethink DB successful, but in spite of all our efforts we were ultimately unable to build a sustainable business. There is a lot of information to unpack - over the next few months, I'll write about lessons learned so the startup community can benefit from our mistakes

    In thread discussions, people are suggesting joining The Eclipse Foundation or the Linux Foundation . If the community does not abandon the project, then it will develop further. It will probably be much slower, but still. At a minimum, if you are currently using this DBMS in the prod, then it seems to me that there is no point in changing it if it suits you. On the other hand, the API will probably not change much anymore. This will be good news for those who write drivers under Rethink.

    The team itself is looking for a new place to exert its enthusiasm. They are currently considering joining Stripe . As I understand it, from a post with Hacker NewsStripe already made them an offer. It may be possible under the wing of Stripe to continue to develop Rethink further, although not at the same pace as before. Gotta Believe!

    PS We personally use RethinkDB for an online game. We store all game data in it. At one time, they moved him with Riak and still have not regretted it. The base is pretty nimble. The subscription mechanism allows you to receive changes without making unnecessary gestures. In the context of our game, for example, we subscribe to changes in player profiles (rating, etc.), and then, after a little processing, add to Redis, and already make ratings requests to it.

    Now there is also an automatic failover, so the cluster will not fall apart from the fall of a pair of nodes (depending on how many nodes you have, of course).

    References:

    1. RethinkDB is shutting down .
    2. RethinkDB on crunchbase .
    3. Discussion on Hacker News.
    4. Horizon is a realtime JavaScript backend .
    5. Building real-time web applications with RethinkDB .
    6. Introduction to RethinkDB .

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