Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my GitHub account. 5 awesome years working with talented and passionate people to make OrientDB a better product. During this time, I received 1000’s of comments, commits and pull requests. To give you an idea, just on the core OrientDB project, we’ve had 10,197 commits, 42 releases and 80 contributors. If we add all the other projects under the Orient Technologies management, we have way more than 100 contributors and 15,000 commits.
Thanks to everybody for your time and the passion you bring to improving OrientDB. I appreciate each and every contribution. I always tried to give visibility to the great work from contributors. (For example, most of the core development and consulting team was hired directly from the community.) Let me know if I can do more.
Unfortunately, sometimes I had to make decisions for the long term future of the product that weren’t welcomed by all of you. I apologize if I hurt someone's feelings but there are multiple voices to consider and not all the advice could be accepted.
A few days ago, a “disgruntled” anonymous user and advocate of a competing product created multiple brand-new accounts on GitHub/Twitter/HackerNews/etc. He seems to be on a mission to spread his negative feelings about OrientDB and me personally retweeting his blog to happy OrientDB users and to the world. This is very unfortunate.
With more than 50,000 downloads a month, I accept that having 100% of satisfied users is impossible. That said, rest assured that I’ve read his suggestions and am taking his feedback seriously and in a constructive way to make OrientDB even better. Stability and performance are our priority and our code contributions are going in that direction. We have 2,869 test cases in our product and we’re adding more daily.
Since OrientDB is new technology, we encourage all clients to work directly with the OrientDB team. If clients prefer to pay for consulting services outside of the OrientDB team (for assistance with data modeling, query performance tuning, POC building, etc) it’s important that they work with a certified OrientDB consultant to ensure they have the training/knowledge required. Also, it’s important that they look at the project design as a whole from the beginning instead of trying to fix pieces of an implementation after the deadline has been reached. Coming from the RDBMS world can be tricky, because you have to adopt a new way of thinking and working. However, our experience has been, once you understand how OrientDB works, you won’t want to go back to the old ways of managing data.
Do I think that OrientDB is perfect? Absolutely not. I’ve spent my entire life building this product. Everyone involved with the project works hard to improve it every day. We accept there are bugs to fix and stuff to improve, however we’re also encouraged by the feedback of 1,000’s of happy users and 100’s of paying customers.
Do I think OrientDB is the best thing happening in the DBMS industry in the last 40 years? Absolutely YES.
Everyone’s free to chose the database deemed appropriate for their use cases. I respect the right of people to do that and I’m happy to hear all constructive feedback. However, we don’t allow disrespectful language or offensive remarks, as this does not contribute to creating great software. In my 5 years on GitHub, I've only blocked one user/one conversation (deleting one comment only) - and it was for this reason.
Going forward, please submit your feedback regarding the product within Github or in the community forum. I will address this topic exclusively with my code contributions and by providing outstanding support to customers. If you want to talk to me about how OrientDB can be improved or get some help on your next project, I’d be really happy to help. Please drop an email to l-dot-garulli-- at --orientdb-dot-com, or write to the info -at--- orientdb.com if you want to involve the company.
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