1) It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite:
https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso
2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from:
That says enough.
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.
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
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.
Looking at the comments each time this product comes up, Rust is apparently the selling point for many, including the dev team themselves.
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
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
> SQLite Test Harness #3 (hereafter "TH3") is one of three test harnesses used for testing SQLite.
You must be kidding. Last time I checked, sqlite was mostly extensive test suites.
2. Compare to the test in Turso, the test in Turso is just kids toy.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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"