Alternatives
Products that do what A Database Written in C does
Hey hackernews! I'd like to share a hobby and passion project I've been working on for almost a year now. It's an open-source storage engine (underlying component of a database(s)) similar to that of LevelDB/RocksDB but written entirely in C. The storage engine is called TidesDB. TidesDB is written entirely in C. It's designed as a fast, transactional key-value storage engine built on a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) architecture. My journey with TidesDB began nearly 2 years ago whilst I was experimenting with various data structures and databases in Go. When I encountered the…
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Hey everyone, I am sharing my open-source storage engine project TidesDB. I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts. Cheers.
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Hello HN! These last few months I've been working on my first open source project: an embedded database written in pure-go. That took me some months, as I had to learn how to deal with such large packages. Until then, all packages I had made were quite small an did not require much. I usually did not have to worry about things like allocation optimization and instance pools until This project. It started when I wanted to make a port of a tool to a TUI environment. I'm actually used to working with TUIs in golang, so that was my language of choice. The tool I wanted to port is written in…
Feb 2026
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Hi HN, we're Eric and Dean, creators of SchemafreeSQL. Its roots go back to an on-line Web App Development Environment we developed back in 1999. It was comprised of an IDE, Web Server, Object Store, Virtual File System, Template System, and polyglot (Java, JavaScript, and Python). Of course, we named it “.OS”. Then we ended up dropping it. But that's a story for another time. It was the ease of use of the Object Store from .OS that we really missed, which brings us back to SchemafreeSQL. It provides an enhanced API to your SQL Database which allows it to function as a Schemaless…
2022 · schemafreesql.com
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2019 · github.com
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Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
2017
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2015 · github.com
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Hi! I wanted to understand more about databases' internals so I wrote one from scratch. It has a T-SQL inspired syntax with support for functions and procedures. It can be used stand-alone as a SQL engine or with a server allowing for persistence and replication to other connected clients. Performance are nothing near sqlite of course but that's beside the point. It’s a small database engine that can run in a web app as a way to store session data, do small calculations on a web worker, store the document/data the user is editing or facilitate “multiplayer” feature by broadcasting the…
2022 · github.com
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2022 · github.com
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I couldn't find a database that was immutable (like Datomic) and embedded (like SQLite), so I made one. The reference impl is in Zig and there are now ports for Java, Clojure, TypeScript, and Go.
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Hey everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I thought I'd share a new open source Go project I started. It’s called Starskey! I’ve been diligently studying database internals, data structures, and more for almost two years now, writing many different things. This open-source key-value store is built on top of a log-structured merge tree, inspired by WiscKey and LevelDB. It's fairly fast, durable and rather efficient. It's meant to provide you a persistent embedded storage option for binary key value pairs. Github https://github.com/starskey-io/starskey Web…
2025 · github.com
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Hello HN! I've been working on Atomic Database[1] for almost exactly a month now, having restarted from an earlier Hackathon prototype version. Atomic Database is a deductive database like Datalog that has a useful GUI interface, a natural language query system, smart metadata storage, and gradual typing capabilities. The actual database backend of all this is based on Entity Attribute Value triples currently (I don't forsee changing it, as yet!). This is still very much a prototype, but I feel like I'm at the stage in its evolution where I need some outside input and, possibly, help. To…
2019
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This is my hobby C compiler project. Decided to publish the code today, as it finally compiled itself. The readme on the linked GitHub page has a bit of information on how it works. I wrote the thing for fun, but if anyone gets a better understanding of the dark corners of C because of it, I am happy.
2022 · github.com
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Two and a half years ago, Edward, Dylan, and I started this journey to build a new database for an old problem that has long plagued the infrastructure software industry. Today, we are proud to announce that this database, TiDB, is production ready. Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘the best way to predict the future is to create it.’ The future we predicted 771 days ago we now have created, because of the hard work and dedication of not just every member of our team, but also every contributor, user, and partner in our open source community. Today, we celebrate and pay gratitude to the power of…
2017
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Hey hn! I hope you're all doing well. I’d like to share a new open-source database I’ve designed and written called SuperMassive. SuperMassive is a scalable, distributed, in-memory key-value database designed from the ground up to allow for high concurrency, fast writes, fault tolerance, and durability while remaining simple to use and efficiently scalable. The idea for SuperMassive comes from its name.. I wanted to build a key-value database that can scale infinitely, remain durable, be self-healing, consistent, and blazing fast. I also wanted to simplify sharding and replication compared…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN, A few friends and I have spent the past 6 years or so developing a way to write data transformation code in a way that can easily adapt to changes in logic or data elements both upstream and downstream without the need major refactoring, regression testing, or re-orchestration. We decided to open source the project about two months ago and published a CLI tool after we realized how big of a task it was to take on incumbents like stored procedures, dbt, and psyspark. It is early days for our community and we are looking to grow and engage with others to poke holes and contribute…
2024 · github.com
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CJIT started as a hobby project around Fabrice Bellard’s tinyCC and slowly grew into something much more practical. It is now a small portable C compiler and runner that works across Linux, macOS, and Windows, can self host, and is packaged as a single executable. What mattered most to me was keeping the barrier to entry low. You can take one small binary, drop it onto a system, and compile or run C code using the libraries already available there, without setting up a full toolchain or installing a large stack of dependencies. I find that useful for quick prototyping, testing, auditing,…
Apr 2026 · dyne.org
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This is my side project for the past few months. I started it because I just learned about functional programming and at the same time want to write something cool in C. Web playground: https://leonw774.github.io/lreng
2025 · github.com
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I'm a couple years late to the party but DuckDB is blowing my mind. I couldn't find an good embedded DuckDB stream processing solution so I hacked my own, calling it SQLFlow: https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow SQLFlow enables writing stream transformations in pure sql, executed using DuckDB. The goal was to create a lightweight, performant stream processing engine using pure SQL transformations, DuckDB didn't disappoint! I'd love your feedback, feature requests, impressions, or just comments. I'd love to turn this into a stable, usable project that people are…
2023 · github.com
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Hi HN! I've been working on AnuDB, a lightweight embedded key-value database written in C++ with a focus on simplicity, performance, and small footprints. It now has native MQTT support, allowing you to write directly to the database by publishing to an MQTT topic. but it’s designed to work well on embedded devices, edge nodes, and anywhere you need local persistence without spinning up a full database server. Highlights: MQTT-based data ingestion (zero setup DB writes via publish) Small and fast (single binary, no external dependencies) Append-only write-ahead log for durability Demo:…
2025 · github.com
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