Feeling good about our decision to stick with it for our core infrastructure's next incarnation. Still very sad that they didn't make it as a company. We would have paid. RethinkDB is an unbelievable technology: better under the hood and IMHO easier to use than MongoDB, and combining NoSQL with some SQL-like features that for us are good enough. The rough edges we've found so far are minor.

We used PostgreSQL before and while excellent on a single node it's deeply painful to cluster. You need a full time DBA to make sure you're doing it right, as GitLab discovered, and when it fails it gives error messages that seem more cryptic than C++ template errors. Amazon RDS was insanely pricey compared to bare metal (our load is both CPU-bound and disk-IO-heavy bare metal on OVH is >10X cheaper than Amazon) and Redshift didn't have pgsql syntax yet. Even now that it does I'm not sure I want to be bound to it as I have an instinctive aversion to cloud lock-in.