[coffeemug]

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.

[codelust]

Hey Slava,

First up, congrats. Whatever the back story is, getting funded (save runaway revenue/profits/margins) is always a crucial inflection point in a company/product's lifecycle as an enabler for bigger and better things. Whether those will eventually happen or not, nobody knows. But there are a lot of things that only money can accomplish and investment is a key enabler for a start-up that needs capital to scale/grow. If you find an investor who is aligned extremely well, it is a massive bonus.

Historically, a lot of good has also happened from a combination of events that may not exactly be awesome. Outcomes always trump everything else. So don't sweat the mind-reading angle much!

Can't comment much on the technical aspects of the product as I am not even remotely qualified to do something like that.

I'm excited for your team and I have immense respect for anyone who builds an OSS company. There is much that the world owes to numerous companies and individuals releasing code like this and don't get enough credit for it. So, thank you and hopefully it will come together very well for everyone involved :)

[Dave_Rosenthal]

Slava, I love the "horseless carriage" analogy. I'll have to use that as I try to raise money in the NoSQL space :) Seriously though, it also points to a future where the NoSQL name is going make less and less sense. Anyone have suggestions for the NoSQL database equivalent of the word 'car'?

-Dave (FoundationDB)

[StavrosK]

Like my sibling commenter said, I prefer names that are more descriptive. I prefer "schemaless" databases, but it depends on what you do. Redis is called NoSQL but it's not a document database, it's more a key-value store with lots of slicing and dicing features.

[dragonwriter]

> Anyone have suggestions for the NoSQL database equivalent of the word 'car'?

Not really, because "NoSQL" databases aren't really a coherent group of things. "Document databases" is a good name for an important subset, though. As are "Column-oriented datastores".