How Turso Made SQLite Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Customer

Turso

Founders

Glauber Costa

Pekka Enberg

SQLite is popular for a reason. The open-source database system is simple, lightweight, and fast, and it's grown into the most widely deployed database in the world, by far. Most people touch it every day, even if we don't realize it; for example, the databases that store the texts on Android or iOS phones use SQLite. That said, it hasn't historically been robust enough for modern production workloads; it doesn't support replication, for instance, which makes high availability and disaster recovery tough.

Enter: Turso. Their platform makes it possible to use SQLite in modern production-grade applications. Founder Glauber Costa calls Turso's additions "smart quality of life improvements" that allow devs to integrate SQLite into their ready-for-primetime apps without worrying about the historical downsides.

Improved but compatible 🤝

To create Turso, their dev team forked the SQLite project into an open contribution version called libSQL. "We are very dogmatic about keeping libSQL fully backwards compatible with SQLite", says Costa. This approach ensures developers can easily integrate with or migrate to libSQL without hefty changes, while still taking advantage of Turso's production-ready scalability.

SQLite for modern applications

Among the (many) quality of life improvements made, they've added replication, backups, and disaster recovery, making the database system more highly available and capable of handling failures without disruption.

In addition to those enhancements, Turso's added native vector search support, so devs can easily retrieve embeddings for AI use cases without needing to add an additional datastore to their stack.

Building fast without a DevOps team

Turso leans on Fly.io's "scale to zero" feature—which allows their databases to scale down when not in use—to pass cost-savings on to their customers via free plans. Offering lower cost options for users has freed them up to do product-led growth, letting them gain more traction than they'd expected at this stage. Fly.io's ability to let users deploy swiftly to numerous regions has also been a significant advantage; according to Costa, Turso has "a lot of people from underserved regions in the world that love the fact that we offer them a region in Mexico, for example." Turso also relies on Fly.io's robust filesystem offering to build both remote and embedded replication into their libSQL fork of SQLite.

When they launched, Turso's small engineering team—10 people, including founder Glauber Costa—wanted to avoid hiring an additional DevOps team to manage Kubernetes. Moving to Fly.io meant that Turso's current team (mostly Go engineers) could handle deployments and other tasks that would typically require DevOps specialists, and implement product work faster. Says Costa, "there are several features that would have taken us years to put into the market; with Fly.io's infrastructure, it took us months."