Alternatives
Products that do what UnisonDB – Log-native KV database that replicates like a message bus does
Hi HN, For the past few months, I’ve been building UnisonDB — a log-native database where the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) is the database, not just a recovery mechanism. I started this because every time I needed data to flow — from core to edge, or between datacenters — I ended up gluing together a KV database + CDC + Kafka. It worked, but it always felt like overkill: too many moving parts for even small workloads, and too little determinism. What is it? UnisonDB unifies storage and streaming into a single log-based core. Every write is: • Durable (appended to the WAL), • Ordered (globally…
- 1UB
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 2IA
Hey there HN! We’re Joe and Stopa, and today we’re open sourcing InstantDB, a client-side database that makes it easy to build real-time and collaborative apps like Notion and Figma. Building modern apps these days involves a lot of schleps. For a basic CRUD app you need to spin up servers, wire up endpoints, integrate auth, add permissions, and then marshal data from the backend to the frontend and back again. If you want to deliver a buttery smooth user experience, you’ll need to add optimistic updates and rollbacks. We do these steps over and over for every feature we build, which can…
2024 · github.com
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- 4PS
Hello HN, I am Sai Srirampur, one of the Co-founders of PeerDB. (https://github.com/PeerDB-io/peerdb). We spent the past 7 months building a solid experience to replicate data from Postgres to data warehouses. Now we're expanding to queues. PeerDB Streams provides a simple and native way to replicate changes as they happen in Postgres to Queues (Kafka, Redpanda, Google PubSub, etc). We use Postgres logical decoding to enable Change Data Capture (CDC). Blog post here: https://blog.peerdb.io/peerdb-streams-simple-native-postgres.... 10-min quickstart here:…
2024
- 5DA
Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…
2023 · driftdb.com
- 6DJ
Hello HN, I’m Gaurav. Founder & CEO of Dassana. We are coming out of stealth today and would like to invite the community to give us a try. https://lake.dassana.io/ First, a bit of a backstory. I grew up with grep to search log files. The kind of person whose grep was aliased to grep -i. Then came along Splunk. It was a game-changer. For every single start-up I started (there are a few) I used Splunk and quite often we will run out of our ingestion quota. SumoLogic wasn’t cheaper either so we looked into DataDog. It was good until we started running issues with aggregate…
2022
- 7AD
Recently created a minimal persistent relational database in Go. Main focus was on implementing & understanding working the of database, storage management & transaction handling. Use of B+ Tree for storage engine(support for indexing), managing a Free List (for reusing nodes), Support for transactions, Concurrent Reads. Still have many things to add & fix like query processing being one of the main & fixing some bugs Repo link - https://github.com/Sahilb315/AtomixDB Would love to hear your thoughts
2025 · github.com
- 8BD
Hi HN, Today we’re launching PowerSync, a Postgres<>SQLite bi-directional sync engine that enables an offline-first app architecture. It currently supports Flutter, React Native and web (JavaScript) using Wasm SQLite in the browser, with more client SDKs on the way. Conrad and I (Ralf) have been working on our sync engine since 2009, originally as part of a full-stack app platform. That version of the system is still used in production worldwide and we’ve learnt a lot from its use cases and scaling. About a year ago we started on spinning off PowerSync as a standalone product that is…
2023 · powersync.com
- 9PD
PicoMQ is a Rust server for Durable Streams, built on Object Store. Cheap, URL-addressable, granular streams (create/append/read/long-poll/SSE), with Pico Protocol or Durable Streams Protocol as the facade. S3Stream is the stream storage primitive, used in AutoMQ, shipped as a Rust library. Coordination is a command log in Postgres.
13d ago · picomq.com
- 10HO
Hey HN, we want to share HelixDB (https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/), a project a college friend and I are working on. It’s a new database that natively intertwines graph and vector types, without sacrificing performance. It’s written in Rust and our initial focus is on supporting RAG. Here’s a video runthrough: https://screen.studio/share/szgQu3yq. Why a hybrid? Vector databases are useful for similarity queries, while graph databases are useful for relationship queries. Each stores data in a way that’s best for its main type of query (e.g.…
2025 · github.com
- 11SP
This is a MVP for Serverless Postgres. 1/ It uses Fly.io[0], which can automatically pause your database after all connections are released (and start it again when new connections join). 2/ It uses Oriole[1], a Postgres extension with experimental support for S3 / Decoupled Storage[2]. 3/ It uses Tigris[3], Globally Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage. Oriole will automatically backup the data to Tigris using background workers. I wouldn't recommend using this in production, but I think it's in a good spot to provoke some discussion and ideas. You can get it running…
2024 · github.com
- 12DO
One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs. In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take…
2025 · drawdb.app
- 13RA
2024 · github.com
- 14AB
we've been working on a KV store for the past year or so which is 2-6x faster than Redis (benchmark link below) yet disk persisted! so you get the speed of in-memory KV stores but with disk persistence. To achieve this we've created our custom filesystem that is optimized for our special usecase and we're doing smart batching for writes and predictive fetching for reads. In addition to basic operations, it also provides atomic inc/dec, atomic json patch, range scans and a unique key monitoring mechanism (pub-sub) over WebSockets which essentially allows you to receive notification on…
2025 · hpkv.io
- 15RD
Hi Hacker News! We're Jan & Wilco from ReJot (https://rejot.dev). With ReJot we're building a framework that turns the write-ahead log of your database into an asynchronous communication channel for your services. ReJot enables application developers to define how the database tables they own should be replicated to other databases. Something we wish we had at in our previous job at a large fintech. There is a gap between building internal (REST) APIs and Kafka (event streaming) to share data between services. Internal APIs start to break down when you have more than a couple…
2025 · github.com
- 16GA
Hey HN, We've been experimenting with a real-time, version-controlled NoDB for Deno & React called GoatDB. The idea is to remove backend complexity while keeping apps fast, offline-resilient, and easy to self-host. Runs on the client – No backend required, incremental queries keep things efficient. Self-hosted & lightweight – Deploy a single executable, no server stack needed. Offline-first & resilient – Clients work independently & can restore state after server outages. Edge-native & fast – Real-time sync happens locally with minimal overhead. Why We Built It: We needed something that’s…
2025 · github.com
- 17AA
Hey, everyone. I am currently working on AllyDB, which is basically my own Redis, which I am writing in Elixir. Currently, the database is nowhere close to being ready, as you can see in the roadmap, but I am doing my best to add stuff as fast as possible. Currently the implementation is very simple, with an in memory table, an append log persistence system, as well as an interval persistence system as a backup. The database could definitely be optimized further, especially when it comes to persistence, which I am planning to do in the future. I'm also planning to use Rust NIFs for specific…
2023 · github.com
- 18AH
Hi HN, I built Ayder — a single-binary, HTTP-native durable event log written in C. The wedge is simple: curl is the client (no JVM, no ZooKeeper, no thick client libs). There’s a 2-minute demo that starts with an unclean SIGKILL, then restarts and verifies offsets + data are still there. Numbers (3-node Raft, real network, sync-majority writes, 64B payload): ~50K msg/s sustained (wrk2 @ 50K req/s), client P99 ~3.46ms. Crash recovery after SIGKILL is ~40–50s with ~8M offsets. Repo link has the video, benchmarks, and quick start. I’m looking for a few early design partners (any…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 19AH
Hi HN, I’m Ignacio, founder at Basekick Labs. Over the past months I’ve been building Arc, a time-series data platform designed to combine very fast ingestion with strong analytical queries. What Arc does? Ingest via a binary MessagePack API (fast path), Compatible with Line Protocol for existing tools (Like InfluxDB, I'm ex Influxer), Store data as Parquet with hourly partitions, Query via DuckDB engine using SQL Why I built it: Many systems force you to trade retention, throughput, or complexity. I wanted something where ingestion performance doesn’t kill your analytics. Performance &…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 20SB
I had already posted the project a couple of years ago, and it gained some interest, but a lot of stuff has been done since then, especially regarding performance, a completely new JSON store, a REST API, various internals refactored, an improved JSONiq based query engine allowing updates, implementing set-oriented join optimizations, a now already dated web UI, a new Kotlin based CLI, a Python and TypeScript client to ease the use of Sirix... First prototypes from a precursor stem already from 2005. So, what is it all about? The system uses ideas from ZFS (a keyed index trie, storing…
2023 · github.com
- 21SA
Hey HN! Happy to finally launch Stack. We made it because we like to put apps into production quickly, and authentication & user management was taking up way too much time. We have components like and that automatically adapt to whatever theme & design system you're using. Check the blog post to see the example with Radix UI and Joy UI. Also, there's an admin dashboard for monitoring and editing accounts. Stack is 100% AGPL/MIT-licensed, so you can self-host it. Cheers!
2024 · stack-auth.com
- 22DA
For a while now I had the urge to learn how to pick the "right" database for projects, I looked around online at different databases to try to understand their different traits, and was bombarded with marketing instead of actual info on the advantages and drawbacks. The only solution for me was to learn some database internals (I read the wonderful book written by Alex Petrov), and the problems seemed so interesting, I could not fight the urge and went ahead with trying to write my own db. Anyway, ~9 months have passed and I feel like I'm "done", I have learned a ton, and really proud of…
2024 · github.com
- 23XS
Hi! Xata was on HackerNews once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28590816) a bit over a year ago, when we were at the beginning of our development. We've promised we're going to do a Show HN page when we come out of Private Beta, and this just happened today. Xata is a product in the serverless database space. We know that the space is fairly crowded now, with lots of great companies started recently. We're happy to see a fresh wave of database products, that are focused more on the developer experience, rather than a race to the bottom on performance and cost. We…
2022 · xata.io
- 24DF
Hello Everyone! We built SQLFlow as a lightweight stream processing engine. We leverage DuckDB as the stream processing engine, which gives SQLFlow the ability to process 10's of thousands of messages a second using ~250MiB of memory! DuckDB also supports a rich ecosystem of sinks and connectors! https://sql-flow.com/docs/category/tutorials/ https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow We were tired of running JVM's for simple stream processing, and also of bespoke one off stream processors I would love your feedback, criticisms and/or…
Dec 2025 · sql-flow.com
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