Start-Up’s Profile: RethinkDB

Company: RethinkDB

Location: Mountain View, CA

Born in: May 2009

Funding: RethinkDB is the first venture of Hexagram 49, Inc., a Y Combinator-funded company (a venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups).

Executives: RethinkDB is the work of computer science students from Stony Brook University: Michael Glukhovsky, Slava Akhmechet, and Leif Walsh. Michael Glukhovsky was a partner at Remystify Hosting, and founded and ran Computers for Children, a computer refurbishing program for financially disadvantaged students. He has worked as an intern on collaboration and web services at HP, and on emerging web technologies at IBM Webahead Development. Slava Akhmechet was a consultant for infrastructure software, consumer web, and financial companies. Leif Walsh worked on power monitoring as an intern at Google, and on de-dupe in Stony Brook University.

Technology: RethinkDB is a drop-in MySQL storage engine, with no changes required in applications. The start-up has developed "algorithms to deliver amazing features and performance that is up to ten times faster than existing databases", taking advantages of SSDs rather than HDDs. Modifying the data in RethinkDB only results in appending changes to the end of a storage file. Traditional databases maintain a separate journal of operations to ensure that they remains in a consistent state. This requires additional I/O and complicated replay algorithms making recovery a difficult. A RethinkDB database is the log. There are no separate files to write, and no special algorithms to manage. An early developer pre-alpha version can be download.

Our opinion: A small company to follow but it seems that there is more work to be done and more money to be found by these three young guys before the launch and the marketing of the finalized product. But what’s sure is that database are the kind of application where SSDs can be the most useful.