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Subscribe to our blog.Today, we’re ready to announce RethinkDB — a new kind of database. It’s been a winding road. For two years, Mike, Leif, and I have been thinking independently on how to bring a breath of fresh air to the database world. Three months ago, we came together to form a company and bring our ideas to reality. In these three months, we’ve raised seed funding from Y Combinator, moved to California, and built a MySQL plugin that implements the core of our vision — a storage engine redesigned for the modern world. With the exception of storage technology, database design has always been beautiful. Now, with dropping costs of storage, the advent of solid state drives, and advances in functional data structures theory, we can finally replace that last messy component of database management systems with an elegant, beautiful solution.
Much work remains to be done. RethinkDB isn’t ready for general production use. So, why release it today? At a recent Y Combinator dinner, Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” We’re launching too late. The article you’re reading now is served by a WordPress installation running live on RethinkDB. Many of our internal benchmarks outperform a stock MySQL setup. We’re no longer terrified of data corruption (though we still keep our fingers crossed). We’re using RethinkDB for painless hot backups. The time is long overdue for us to share our work with you.
We are committed to building an open, socially responsible company. In the coming weeks we will be releasing as much information about the RethinkDB internals as possible without compromising its commercial success. In the meantime, we’d like to welcome your feedback.
You might want to stop using Apple’s Xcode and Dictionary.app icons on your front page…
Michael: All of the icons we use are under an open license[1,2]. If you do find
any specific copyright violations, we’ll certainly remove them.
[1] http://www.iconfinder.net/icondetails/6166/128/
[2] http://www.iconfinder.net/icondetails/8722/128/
I have serious doubts that “Alessandro Rei” has the rights to redistribute that hammer and blueprint icon and suggest that you check up on it. Beyond copyright concerns, you may very well be infringing on Apple trademarks to use that image on your site. Furthermore, it just seems incredibly unprofessional to see an icon that much of the development community associates with Apple’s development tools featured on the page of an unrelated product.
Hi!
hey, this sounds like an incredibly interesting project/product!
I know I should probably be downloading documentation so I can look it up myself, but what i was wondering about is this: is your storage engine transactional?
TIA,
Roland.
I’ve been hoping someone was working this…congrats on getting something out there!
I don’t want to spoil the party, but have you guys checked http://www.herodotus.biz? (currently offline).
The herodotus database engine appears to be very similar to your database (append-only) but is patented.
Roland: right now the engine is not transactional. We’ve only been at it for two months, and we had to get many other things done. Transactions are certainly on the roadmap – we’ll be implementing poor man’s transactions (a single writer at a time, but ability to rollback) shortly. This will be enough for most OLTP applications (which have very short transactions). We’ll implement full transaction support some time in the near future (not as fast as we’d like, but probably sooner than you think).
Robbert: we certainly know of herodotus. They’re targetting a very different market, and from what I understand their IP doesn’t cover ours. We’re working on patenting our indexing scheme, which is very different from herodotus (from what we’ve been able to gauge).
This looks really cool! Do you have any public available info on the benchmarks you have done?
Michael: Thanks for bringing potential copyright infringement issues to our attention!
After more research, we realized that Alessandro Rei may not have had the right to release all of the icons in his icon sets as GPL. Rather than figuring out their provenance, we decided to just change the icons (which are now all GPL). If you notice any other issues, please let us know (foun…@rethinkdb.com).
Juan: a lot of people have asked us for this. We don’t have public benchmarks yet. We’ll write a blog post tomorrow explaining the situation in detail and giving out more information about our performance.
Can’t wait to see your demo!
Max
I look forward to you guys getting out of the starting blocks. I’m not sure where Rackspace and MediaTemple are at the moment, but you need to talk to these leaders in the cloud computing space. They both are in need of advances in their operational db offerings. I know that Joyent has done some recent work on a no maintenance cloud offering for MySQL through work directly with Sun. SolidDB has some interesting work done with DB indexes, they presented at the recent MySQL Conf. Take care and best of luck.
-Travell
Travell Perkins
CEO / Chief Midnight Coder
RGB Daily, LLC