Alternatives
Products that do what Bugfruit – a simple embedded key-value store does
Hey HN! I work on a database for my day-job and I realized I had never written one from scratch, so I wrote bugfruit! Once I was mostly satisfied with it, I looked up some benchmarks to compare my simple database to other brand name key-value stores. I was surprised to see that mine held up fairly well on the subset of benchmarks I replicated. So I used the Pavlo Database Naming System [0] to name it and open-sourced the code. I'd love to hear any feedback you might have on it! [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2020/03/on-naming-a-datab...
- 1SI
2016 · github.com
- 2

- 3SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 4AS
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
- 5SF
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
- 6IB
Disclaimer it is a heavily AI assisted project. The goal was not to be the most performative but the kind that's easier to learn from. I wanted to share this in case there are people who had the same idea or wanted to see something like this.
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 7HM
One year ago, I downloaded the news.arc code and decided that I would teach myself programming by building a better aggregator. At that time, I had some rudimentary HTML knowledge, and little FORTRAN under my belt. I knew that I wanted an aggregator that could support a wide range of submissions, and one that could scale without losing quality for the user. Hubski is what I have to show for my time and effort. The easiest way to describe Hubski is to say that it uses a commenting system akin to HN or Reddit, but uses a sharing scheme like Twitter. You have a personal feed comprised of the…
2011
- 8AD
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
- 9GA
2016 · github.com
- 10GA
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
- 11IL
My name is Elliott. For the last three years, I’ve been building a DevOps platform on the best-in-class open source platforms (Kubernetes, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Grafana, etc.). The goal is to give engineering teams access to a modern DevOps infrastructure without needing to have a full SRE/DevOps team dedicated. It’s also open source /fair source - all the source code is here → https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included I shipped a public beta today and would love to hear initial reactions, thoughts, and feedback. Here are details of the platform: *…
2024 · batteriesincl.com
- 12SA
Hi, this has been a labor of love over the last few days =) Can't wait to hear you feedback and of course AMA!
2023 · blog.airsequel.com
- 13SS
I built *snkvDB* — a single-header, ACID-compliant key-value store with zero setup. https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv ### Why I built this I wanted something as simple as a hashmap, but: * persistent * crash-safe * no external dependencies * easy to drop into any C/C++ project Most KV stores are either: * too heavy (servers, background processes), or * too low-level (you manage everything) snkvDB tries to sit in between. --- ### What it is * Single-header KV store (just include and use) * ACID compliant (thanks to SQLite) * No server, no config, no build system…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 14IM
Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.com
- 15IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
- 16AS
2015 · github.com
- 17IW
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 18UI
Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
- 19VA
Hey HN, At Mintplex Labs are building developer tools for AI applications. One area we encountered frustration was the use of Vector Databases like Pinecone, Chroma, QDrant, or Weaviate to "unlock" long-term memory and contextual answers. It is nearly impossible to manage this data when in use for production. The craziest thing was how you cannot atomically CRUD any vectors in most of these vector databases. Let alone easily copy, clone, or migrate data or entire indexes without paying for re-embedding - among other things. With VectorAdmin you get a database level UI with the ability to…
2023 · vectoradmin.com
- 20HM
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
- 21SD
Hey Hacker News! Last week we made the codebase for product 100% open source. This week we shipped a dashboard to manage connectors, as well as integrations with Google Drive, Zendesk, Notion, and Confluence. This means Sidekick is now the fastest way to sync data from these tools to a vector database. Why is this important? For developers building LLM apps, data integrations are often the least interesting and most time consuming part of the process. For those that don’t want to roll their own ETL, Sidekick is an opinionated tool that lets them get an API endpoint to run semantic searches…
2023 · app.getsidekick.ai
- 22AE
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
- 23IM
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
- 24IM
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