A very wise systems programmer once told me: “Don’t guess. Measure.” Since then, I’ve learned the hard way that guessing too much about performance is death by a thousand cuts. For RethinkDB, dozens of factors for I/O alone affect performance (not to mention memory, buses, caches, and CPU cores).

It’s been a busy and exciting week since we announced RethinkDB. Of all the feedback we received, the most common request was for performance numbers. Before the launch our top priority was correctness. We spent most of our time testing RethinkDB with Wordpress and adding the missing features. As a result, performance suffered. In the past week we tuned the engine back up to high performance. We’re still far from finished with the improvements we want to make, but we feel that we’ve reached a level of performance we can be proud to display.

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.