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**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, wow, wow. That's what I'll say right now. That's how he'd respond. |
**Glauber Costa:** So how do you rewrite SQLite with the confidence that it will actually have the level of trust that SQLite acquired? It's super-easy, barely an inconvenience, right? All you have to do is write the deterministic -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Just throw a DST at it. So when you talk about SQLite-compatible, that's Limbo's goal. There's a lot of different fronts that that has to be on; are you talking file structure, are you talking syntax language? Are there performance compatibilities? There's all kinds of things that SQLite is. What's Lim... |
**Glauber Costa:** First of all, compatibility in a project like this - and this is the experience that we gained at Scylla, when we were rewriting Apache Cassandra. Compatibility has to be like a one-way street, right? You don't want to shackle yourself and say "I will always..." Because sometimes, for example, to imp... |
\[36:26\] Limbo so far - and this is something that we want to keep - the language is the same. Again, we want to keep the language, we want to keep the API, we want to be able to load SQLite extensions. The file format, obviously - it's the thing that defines SQLite, so obviously... Again, we might add to it in the fu... |
So one of the other ways in which we test Limbo is by now out of the simulator just generating random SQL statements, and then seeing that the bytecode that is generated by Limbo is the same bytecode set of instructions that is generated by SQLite. That doesn't catch bugs in the implementation of the bytecode, but at l... |
**Jerod Santo:** So I mentioned at the top that it also has some ambitious goals. One of those - fully asynchronous IO, which is quite a bit different than SQLite, right? So how do you accomplish that, but maintain this compatibility? |
**Glauber Costa:** Yeah, so async is something that a lot of people misunderstand. Async doesn't mean -- for the Rust-minded people in the audience, to be clear, async does not mean that we're going to use an async runtime like Tokyo, or like others. I actually personally wrote an async runtime when I was a Datadog, th... |
So if you look at the Limbo code, it's just really sync Rust. It's not async Rust. So all that async means is that when you call an operation, if that operation is not ready, it will return to you, instead of blocking. And now I'm getting a little bit too technical, but let me just give you the full context. The SQLite... |
And then with that, it becomes very easy to plug something like Tokyo on top in Rust, or run it on the browser, or whatever, because you can call those async functions. And if it's not ready, it will not block. That's all that means. But it doesn't mean that we have to use the async runtime internally. In fact, quite t... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what does that unlock for you? Because SQLite historically is sync, but super-fast, because it's right there, in process, and stuff. But... |
**Glauber Costa:** Well, it isn't that fast. I ran a query yesterday, for example, that took 10 minutes to run. That was a query for five joins, looking at all the user data about users who are signed up to the Turso platform. It takes a long time, just because the query is complicated. SQLite is very fast for CRUD sty... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[39:59\] Sure. |
**Glauber Costa:** But it's not super-fast for analytical stuff. So the first thing that it unlocks is just this, queries that are much more complex, that you can run in dashboards, and things like that. And also, for the serverless environments, Turso being one example... And for clarification, I'm going to say - our ... |
But our product, Turso Cloud, allows you to do serverless SQLite on the cloud. You have a bunch of HTTP requests there in the middle. It allows you, for example, to host your data on S3. Because if you have your data hosted on S3, your query now is not necessarily super-fast, because you may be hitting a page that is n... |
So there's a lot of things that it unlocks. In fact, the one thing that -- Limbo doesn't even support transactions. It's very, very early, which for a lot of people who came to contribute, they actually saw as an advantage, because you come with this energy and there's so much to do... But we're not even yet at the poi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you've put a lot of thought behind this; not expecting it to be so well received, you've put so much, it seems like just so much thought in the design of it, from the DST, to async, to all the things... But why were you so surprised it was so well received? |
**Glauber Costa:** Technically, we've put a lot of thought in the product. And the full story there is that, first of all, we consider as - just revisiting, especially if people are joining now - we considered rewriting SQLite from the get-go anyway. So this was always on our mind. This was always on our mind. And we a... |
So we were very thoughtful about the technical decisions that we were making, but everything around the presentation was just like "Yeah, whatever, man. Whatever." So again, this was not on our company's GitHub, this was on Pekka's personal GitHub... He spent 10 seconds thinking about the name, and then just said "It's... |
\[43:58\] So there was not a lot of thought on the presentation and publishing, but there was a lot of thought about the technical side, because we thought that "Hey, maybe in two years, maybe in three years, there is a play for us once we are a much more established company to tackle rewriting SQLite." What we did not... |
And so we hired those two engineers. We got two incredibly good engineers that started contributing to the project. Again, it was just a project on Pekka's GitHub. |
So we knew that there was something there, and we decided "Let's just now publish it as an official Turso experiment." We wrote in the blog post "Maybe, if that goes well, in six months we can start pouring some of our resources in, and then we're gonna see what happens." |
So we had some idea that this will be useful at some point, we just did not know it will be so well received, to the point that it was... To the point that we changed our entire company strategy now to be able to pour our whole weight of our resources behind the project. And that's what we're going to do. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you're all-in now. |
**Glauber Costa:** We're all in. And in fact, we wrote a blog post last week, telling the story, a lot of what we're discussing here. Look, in my wildest dreams, in my wildest dreams, I would expect maybe this to gain like 2,000 more stars in a month or so, then from 1,000 it goes to 3,000... Maybe a couple of other en... |
And there is a blog post that we wrote recently with all the changes that we're going to make to the platform to allow us to do this, with all the changes that we're doing to the company... We had a lot of reorganizations internally. And this is really something that we decided in a couple of weeks in January, because ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think made those two contributors that were so pivotal contribute? If this was an experiment on Pekka's personal GitHub, it wasn't from a technical level well thought out, but just an experiment... What was compelling to them? |
**Glauber Costa:** Yes, and again, those two individuals in particular, they are now working for us, and we hired them already last year, because they're great. Pekka and I were like "Man, if Limbo has no other value, it's a great hiring tool for a company, because it's attracting this kind of people." But those are pe... |
So \[unintelligible 00:47:45.27\] those two contributors, are obviously the first ones that we talked to. And the story is always the same. The story is always the same, and it's exactly the thing I said. They were very excited about the prospect of a better SQLite. They knew about LibSQL, but LibSQL never enticed them... |
\[48:19\] So when they saw this thing that -- and I think you add this sprinkle to that as well too - this is a new project, so there's so many things to do, which engineers get attracted to to some extent as well. But if you talk to them, again, it's always the same story. "I love the vision, and I already loved the v... |
**Jerod Santo:** So does LibSQL just go away then, or be replaced outright? |
**Glauber Costa:** LibSQL came to be a little bit -- and a part of that because, again, as I said, after... We had this dream of replacing SQLite for 10 minutes, and then it became clear that it wouldn't happen... So we had this something that was very valuable. We knew it was valuable, but we had to struggle a little ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Glauber Costa:** It's an open source project, so we're still going to be maintaining that, but the client-side part is going to be full Limbo. |
We intend to eventually get all of those things redone, like vector search, all of that. LibSQL is still maintained for the time being, because again, we have a business around it, we have features that we depend on, but our goal is to eventually port all of those features to Limbo, which again, we plan to rename to Tu... |
**Break**: \[51:13\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Is there trailblazing left to do? Or have you done the trailblazing and now it's just a matter of work? |
**Glauber Costa:** Oh, there's so much... Because one of the things that we heard as we launched LibSQL - for some reason, I'll never forget that individual. So we create this Discord community, we announce LibSQL, people came, and one person in particular, but others said the same thing as well... "Give me better sche... |
So one of the areas, for example, the SQLite is really bad at is schema changes. You can make schema changes, but you cannot alter the type of a column... There's all sorts of limitations like that. Which is something, by the way, that we made better in LibSQL. So LibSQL does better schema changes than SQLite, but it's... |
So we want to run replication, like native replication to the browser, which is something people have been asking us for a long time. Imagine you have this SQLite database running on your browser, that can then sync with an external server \[unintelligible 00:54:41.06\] or whatever, and just get pages on demand. That's... |
**Jerod Santo:** How much time, do you think? Are we talking months, years? |
**Glauber Costa:** Nine months to a year. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nine months to a year. Okay. |
**Glauber Costa:** For two reasons. First of all, because of the deterministic simulation testing. Because it allows you to move with a lot more confidence. Imagine trying to get into the thought process of a database writer. It's always like "I want to make this change, but I don't fully understand the impact that thi... |
Sometimes Linux has a lot of weird stuff in the process of development around the idea of like "We know that this thing can break on a processor that only three people have in the world, and it's not supported anymore, and we don't want to break those things." So we always move very, very, very, very carefully. And the... |
The second reason for why we believe a year is the reasonable timeframe here is that SQLite, as it turns out - and that's why one of the reasons we believe in forking, and I mean rewriting - is not the biggest codebase in the world. SQLite is not that complex. If we were rewriting Postgres, it's a completely different ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So next January we'll be talking about - is it production grade? 1.0? What does it look like? |
**Glauber Costa:** We want to release a 1.0 much earlier than that; much earlier than that, because we want to -- we'll see. We still believe in release often, just put it out there. |
**Jerod Santo:** Get it out there, yeah. |
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