Will Turso Be The Better SQLite? (with Glauber Costa)

About this episode

Glauber Costa discusses the development of Turso, a complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust, addressing its limitations and the challenges of evolving embedded databases.

SQLite is embedded everywhere - phones, browsers, IoT devices. It's reliable, battle-tested, and feature-rich. But what if you want concurrent writes? Or CDC for streaming changes? Or vector indexes for AI workloads? The SQLite codebase isn't accepting new contributors, and the test suite that makes it so reliable is proprietary. So how do you evolve an embedded database that's effectively frozen? Glauber Costa spent a decade contributing to the Linux kernel at Red Hat, then helped build Scylla, a high-performance rewrite of Cassandra. Now he's applying those lessons to SQLite. After initially forking SQLite (which produced a working business but failed to attract contributors), his team is taking the bolder path: a complete rewrite in Rust called Turso. The project already has features SQLite lacks - vector search, CDC, browser-native async operation - and is using deterministic simulation testing (inspired by TigerBeetle) to match SQLite's legendary reliability without access to its test suite. The conversation covers why rewrites attract contributors where forks don't, how the Linux kernel maintains quality with thousands of contributors, why Pekka's "pet project" jumped from…

People in this episode

Host: Kris Jenkins

Guest: Glauber Costa

Topics covered

• embedded databases
• SQLite
• concurrent writes
• database evolution
• Rust programming
• open source contributions

Keywords

• SQLite
• Turso
• Glauber Costa
• Rust
• concurrent writes
• CDC
• vector indexes
• embedded databases

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Red Hat, Scylla, TigerBeetle

Products: SQLite, Turso

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