Distributed SQLite on FoundationDB
Hello HN! I'm building mvsqlite, a distributed variant of SQLite with MVCC transactions, that runs on FoundationDB. It is a drop-in replacement that just needs an `LD_PRELOAD` for existing applications using SQLite. I made this because Blueboat (https://github.com/losfair/blueboat) needs a native SQL interface to persistent data. Apparently, just providing a transactional key-value store isn’t enough - it is more easy and efficient to build complex business logic on an SQL database, and it seems necessary to bring a self-hostable distributed SQL DB onto the platform.…
In plain words
Distributed SQLite on FoundationDB is a drop-in replacement for SQLite that adds multi-version concurrency control and runs on FoundationDB. It requires only an `LD_PRELOAD` to work with existing SQLite applications. Built to provide SQL capabilities for the Blueboat platform, it offers a self-hostable distributed SQL database that addresses FoundationDB's transaction size and duration limits through a multi-version page store backend.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN! I'm building mvsqlite, a distributed variant of SQLite with MVCC transactions, that runs on FoundationDB. It is a drop-in replacement that just needs an `LD_PRELOAD` for existing applications using SQLite. I made this because Blueboat (https://github.com/losfair/blueboat) needs a native SQL interface to persistent data. Apparently, just providing a transactional key-value store isn’t enough - it is more easy and efficient to build complex business logic on an SQL database, and it seems necessary to bring a self-hostable distributed SQL DB onto the platform. Since FoundationDB is Blueboat’s only stateful external dependency, I decided to build the SQL capabilities on top of it. At its core, mvsqlite’s storage engine, mvstore, is a multi-version page store built on FoundationDB. It addresses the duration and size limits (5 secs, 10 MB) of FDB transactions, by handling multi-versioning itself. Pages are fully versioned, so they are always snapshot-readable in the future. An SQLite transaction fetches the read version during `BEGIN TRANSACTION`, and this version is used as the per-page range scan upper bound in future page read requests. For writes, pages are first written to a content-addressed store keyed by the page's hash. At commit, hashes of each written page in the SQLite transaction is written to the page index in a single FDB transaction to preserve atomicity. With 8K pages and ~60B per key-value entry in the page index, each SQLite transaction can be as large as 1.3 GB (compared to FDB's native txn size limit of 10 MB). mvsqlite is not yet "production-ready", since it hasn’t received enough testing, and I may still have a few changes to make to the on-disk format. But please ask here if you have any questions!
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