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

Glauber Costa discusses rewriting SQLite in Rust to build Turso, covering concurrent writes, vector search, and deterministic simulation testing.

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 32 to 64 contributors in a month, and what it takes to build concurrent writes into an embedded database from scratch. -- Support Developer Voices on Patreon: patreon.com/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join Turso: turso.tech/ Turso GitHub: github.com/tursodatabase/turso libSQL (SQLite fork): github.com/tursodatabase/libsql SQLite: sqlite.org/ Rust: rust-lang.org/ ScyllaDB (Cassandra rewrite): scylladb.com/ Apache Cassandra: cassandra.apache.org/ DuckDB (analytical embedded database): duckdb.org/ MotherDuck (DuckDB cloud): motherduck.com/ dqlite (Canonical distributed SQLite): canonical.com/dqlite TigerBeetle (deterministic simulation testing): tigerbeetle.com/ Redpanda (Kafka alternative): redpanda.com/ Linux Kernel: kernel.org/ Datadog: datadoghq.com/ Glauber Costa on X: x.com/glcst Glauber Costa on GitHub: github.com/glommer Kris on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social Kris on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ -- 0:00 Intro 3:16 Ten Years Contributing to the Linux Kernel 15:17 From Linux to Startups: OSv and Scylla 26:23 Lessons from Scylla: The Power of Ecosystem Compatibility 33:00 Why SQLite Needs More 37:41 Open Source But Not Open Contribution 48:04 Why a Rewrite Attracted Contributors When a Fork Didn't 57:22 How Deterministic Simulation Testing Works 1:06:17 70% of SQLite in Six Months 1:12:12 Features Beyond SQLite: Vector Search, CDC, and Browser Support 1:19:15 The Challenge of Adding Concurrent Writes 1:25:05 Building a Self-Sustaining Open Sour