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The thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on t
by ndiddy 9mo ago
The thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on the AI boom. I can easily see how SQLite's development is sustainable, but not Turso's. They're currently trying to grow their userbase as quickly as possible with their free open source offering, but when they have investors breathing down their necks asking about how they're going to get 100x returns I'm not sure how long that'll last. VCs generally expect companies they invest in to grow to $100 million in revenue in 5-10 years. If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point.
- CodingJeebus 9mo agoCompletely agree, I'm looking at pretty much all software this way nowadays. We've all been around long enough to know that "free" VC-backed software always means "free... until it's in our interest to charge for it". And yet users will still complain about the rugpull in 2026, no matter how many times they've been through it. "Fool me once, shame on you"
- akagusu 9mo agoI've lost the count of how many times people were fooled by VC backed companies in this forum.
- hu3 9mo agoI too am weary of VC incentives but: 1) It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite: https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from: https://turso.tech/pricing https://turso.tech/pricing
- g947o 9mo agoElasticsearch was license under Apache 2.0 until they switched. That says enough.
- tcfhgj 9mo agoto AGPL3?
- MobiusHorizons 9mo ago> 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from: I’ve been confused by this for a while. What is it competing with? Surely not SQLite, being client server defeats all the latency benefits. I feel it would be considered as an alternative to cloud Postgres offerings, and it seems unlikely they could compete on features. Genuinely curious, but is there any sensible use case for this product, or do they just catch people who read SQLite was good on hacker news, but didn’t understand any of the why.
- IshKebab 9mo agoThe article talks about this. If you have a project that starts small and an in-process DB is fine, but you end up needing to scale up then you don't have to switch DBs.
- MobiusHorizons 9mo agoThanks. Serves me right for commenting without reading the article.
- gizzlon 9mo agoSo the usecase is: I started with SQLite, but now I have too many terrabytes to fit on one server? That seems.. very uncommon. And since moving it out of process, and even to another network, is going to make it much much much slower. You're going to need a rewrite anyway
- IshKebab 9mo agoI think it's more like you started with SQLite and now you need concurrent writes, replication, sharding, etc. etc. - all the stuff that the "big" databases like PostgreSQL provide.
- lelanthran 9mo agoThat's a valid, but very tiny, use case. After all, if you can tell in advance that you might hit the limits of SQLite, you'd simply start with postgresql on day one, not with a new unproven DB vendor with a product that has been through the trial by fire of existing DBs.
- iamrobertismo 9mo agoThe MIT licensing makes this even less trustworthy. I can image a major cloud or fly.io just proprietary forking them as a service, as cloud providers have done for years.
- bigstrat2003 9mo agoSo what? The MIT licensed original will still be there, you don't lose out on anything if that happens. And also, SQLite itself is public domain, so by your logic we shouldn't trust SQLite either. Which is crazy.
- iamrobertismo 9mo agoI don't understand you reply here. Database startups have always had the consistent issue of cloud providers providing managed solutions without contributing back. It is why many moved to or use the AGPLv3 and why there was the whole SSPL controversy in the first place. Running a successful open source database startup is not trivial. None of this applies to SQLite.
- MobiusHorizons 9mo agoI think the point is that that sounds like a potential problem for turso, but it’s not really a problem for everyone else unless some sort of vendor lockin would prevent using open source alternatives. But given the strong compatibility story with the SQLite file format implied already that just doesn’t seem credible.
- iamrobertismo 9mo agoYeah I am really not speaking in terms of a risk for all end users, just those who may rely on turso as a company. To assume a startup, no matter how well funded, will survive is naive. There are historically a lot of issues with this business model. This is not a certain failure, but we cannot ignore the challenges companies in a similar space have faced.
- simonw 9mo ago"Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite" That's not entirely true. SQLite has a TON of tests that are part of the public domain project: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/test https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/test They do have a test suite that's private which I understand to be more about testing for different hardware - they sell access to that for companies that want SQLite to work on their custom embedded hardware, details here: https://sqlite.org/th3.html https://sqlite.org/th3.html > SQLite Test Harness #3 (hereafter "TH3") is one of three test harnesses used for testing SQLite.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo ago> test suite which is something lacking in SQLite You must be kidding. Last time I checked, sqlite was mostly extensive test suites.
- HAMSHAMA 9mo agoI think they meant that the test suite is not open source. You’re right that it is extensive.
- jzebedee 9mo agoIt's covered in the article. The full SQLite test suite isn't open source, so you (the third party) don't have the same confidence in your modifications as the SQLite team does.
- j16sdiz 9mo ago1. Only if you modify it. There is a free test suit, and You can license the non-free test suit. 2. Compare to the test in Turso, the test in Turso is just kids toy.
- cozzyd 9mo agoAre there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)
- curuinor 9mo agometabase.com, but metabase is intended for business analyst types and is AGPL, with shenanigans for embedding and an enterprise edition thing
- EdwardDiego 9mo agoMan, I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great. Like, doing a massive join across 10 tables and selecting all the columns from all the tables - to only return the average of one column from one table.
- sophacles 9mo agoWhether or not they attempt rug pulls, or other slimy measures to extort money from entrenched users... this VC backed OSS startups have given us some nice things. People fork the permissively licensed code when the scumbuckets get too smelly and the company goes on to irrelevancy while people use the actually OSS version.
- imiric 9mo agoGrafana has been a pretty good steward of OSS. Whether you like their products or not, they've been able to balance the OSS and commercial offerings fairly well.
- cozzyd 9mo agoYeah that's something I actually use quite a bit!
- g947o 9mo agoI was excited about this for a second until seeing your comment. Unless you are Amazon which has the resources to maintain a fork (which is questionable by itself with all the layoffs), you probably shouldn't touch this.
- koverstreet 9mo agoYeah, that's not a good environment for this kind of engineering. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture. On the other hand, Rust code and the culture of writing Rust leads to far more modularity, so maybe some useful stuff will come of it even if the startup fails. I have been excited to see real work on databases in Rust, there are massive opportunities there.
- saidnooneever 9mo agowhere do you see these opportunities? i didnt see a lot of issues personally rust would be better at than C in this domain. care to elaborate? (genuinely curious!) personally i see more benefit in rust for example as ORM and layers that talk to the database. (those are often useful to have in such an ecossystem so you can use the database safe and sanely, like python or so but then u know, fast and secure.)
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoYou need to be crazy to use an ORM. I personally think that even SQL is redundant. I would like to see a high quality embedded database written in Rust.
- speed_spread 9mo agoI vaguely remember a crate doing a RocksDB kind of thing?
- koverstreet 9mo agoYep, exactly this. It's painful having to switch to another language to talk to the database, and ORMs are the worst kind of leaky abstractions. With Rust, we've finally got a systems language that's expressive enough to do a really good job with the API to an embedded database. The only thing that's really missing is language support for properly ergonomic Cap'n Proto support - Swift has stuff in this vein already. That'd mean serializable ~native types with no serialization/deserialization overhead, and it's applicable to a lot of things; Swift developed the support so they could do proper dynamically linked libraries (including handling version skew). If I might plug my project yet again (as if I don't do that enough :) - bcachefs has a high quality embedded database at its core, and one of the dreams has always been to turn that into a real general purpose database. Much of the remaining stuff for making it truly general purpose is stuff that we're going to want sooner or later for the filesystem anyways, and while it's all C today I've done a ton of work on refactoring and modernizing the codebase to hopefully make a Rust conversion tractable, in the not too distant future. (Basically, with the cleanup attribute in modern C, you can do pseudo RAII that's good enough to eliminate goto error handling in most code. That's been the big obstacle to transitioning a C codebase to be "close enough" to what the Rust version would look like to make the conversion mostly syntactic, not a rewrite, and that work is mostly done in bcachefs). The database project is very pie in the sky, but if the project gets big enough (it's been growing, slowly but steadily), that's the dream. One of them, anyways. A big obstacle towards codebases that we can continue to understand, maintain and continue to improve over the next 100 years is giant monorepos, and anything we can do to split giant monorepos apart into smaller, cleaner reusable components is pure gold.
- mhh__ 9mo agoSome lessons about the modern distaste for copyleft here IMO