Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3
I built a SQLite VFS in Rust that serves cold queries directly from S3 with sub-second performance, and often much faster. It’s called turbolite. It is experimental, buggy, and may corrupt data. I would not trust it with anything important yet. I wanted to explore whether object storage has gotten fast enough to support embedded databases over cloud storage. Filesystems reward tiny random reads and in-place mutation. S3 rewards fewer requests, bigger transfers, immutable objects, and aggressively parallel operations where bandwidth is often the real constraint. This was explicitly inspired…
Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3 launched on March 26, 2026 with 185 votes, #179 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Turbolite is a SQLite virtual file system written in Rust that enables running SQL queries directly against databases stored in S3. It achieves sub-250 millisecond response times for cold joins by optimizing for S3's characteristics: fewer requests, larger transfers, and parallel operations. The tool is designed for applications with many inactive databases, such as database-per-tenant architectures, where keeping separate storage volumes would be costly. It is currently experimental and not recommended for production use.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
SQLite VFS with sub-100ms cold JOIN queries from S3 + page-level compression and encryption - russellromney/turbolite
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built a SQLite VFS in Rust that serves cold queries directly from S3 with sub-second performance, and often much faster. It’s called turbolite. It is experimental, buggy, and may corrupt data. I would not trust it with anything important yet. I wanted to explore whether object storage has gotten fast enough to…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Embed an SQLite database in your PostgreSQL table2024 · github.com · ▲180pglite-fusion is a PostgreSQL extension that allows you to embed SQLite databases into your PostgreSQL tables by enabling the creation of columns with the `SQLITE` type. This means every row in the table can have an embedded SQLite database. In addition to the PostgreSQL `SQLITE` type, pglite-fusion provides the `query_sqlite`` function for querying SQLite databases and the `execute_sqlite` function for updating them. Additional functions are listed in the project’s README. The pglite-fusion extension is written in Rust using the pgrx framework [1]. ---- Implementation Details The PostgreSQL…
Distributed SQLite on FoundationDB2022 · github.com · ▲150Hello 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.…
HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)2025 · github.com · ▲237Hey 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.…
Replicate App-Embedded DuckDBs into PostgreSQL with SyncLite OSS2024 · github.com · ▲73Hi HN, We have been building SyncLite, an open-source platform to simplify offline-first application development. If your application uses SQLite or DuckDB, SyncLite lets it continue using the local database as usual while synchronization happens in the background. For SQL-based applications, SyncLite records transactions into transactionally consistent .sqlog files using SQLite as an open replication format. A background consolidator replays those transactions, derives row-level CDC and schema changes, and applies them transactionally to destination databases like PostgreSQL. The same…
Rocky – Rust SQL engine with branches, replay, column lineageApr 2026 · github.com · ▲122Hi HN, I'm Hugo. I've been building Rocky over the past month, shipping fast in the open. The binary is on GitHub Releases, `dagster-rocky` on PyPI, and the VS Code extension on the Marketplace. I held off on a broader announcement until the trust-system surface was coherent enough to talk about as one thing. The governance waveplan — column classification, per-env masking, 8-field audit trail on every run, `rocky compliance` rollup, role-graph reconciliation, retention policies — landed end-to-end last week in engine-v1.16.0 and rounded out in v1.17.4 (tagged 2026-04-26). That's the…
More dev tools this month
the category →
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 25d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 22d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲340Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 20d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 27d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, March 2026
the whole month →
Switch from ChatGPT to Claude with import memory feature
AI · Mar 2026 · claude.com
Littlebird▲709Littlebird remembers everything across your meetings, messages, docs, and apps, then takes action so you can recall any detail and never lose context.
AI · Mar 2026 · littlebird.ai
