Supabase is acquiring Turso
supabase.com161 points by cvburgess 4 hours ago
161 points by cvburgess 4 hours ago
I hope they will put more resources into fixing issues. I remember there were multiple attempts to add it to ClickBench, but each time new bugs were found.
It should not be X times slower than SQLite.
On 22nd of July
> It was loading the data for a week already, and the speed of loading data has dropped to 4 kilobytes per second, and it will take years to load the dataset.
And then on 2nd of August
> It loaded maybe 1% of the data so far.
And then one year after
> I didn't load the data after a year. > I tried it with the fsync removed, but even then it does not work
Ok, I find this more entertaining than I should and almost unbelievable. I know that this codebase was heavily written by LLMs but the execution can't be this bad?
What am I missing and why would Supabase buy the product which can't even load the dataset properly?
You're looking at a software project months after its inception, saying it didn't work well then, and then asking why someone would buy it well over a year later...
1st commit of the project was in August 2023 so not quite few months old. And the performance problem according to https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/1159 has not been yet solved.
So, I think my curiosity still stands.
> 1st commit of the project was in August 2023
Yeah, ok, I took the date from [1] but you're right the project did in some sense exist before then.
[1] https://turso.tech/blog/we-will-rewrite-sqlite-and-we-are-go...
Also hilarious that the rebuttal comment after a year had passed was "why are you using this release which is a year old"
That rebuttal comment was posted in response to a comment that was 4 days old, not a year old.
We're aware of your woes with ClickBench. The first time you added it I even explicitly told you that it was way too early to even try that. The attempt you did recently was fair, but it's all in the ingestion before the benchmark, and does not show up anywhere, so we ended up spending time on this instead:
https://turso.tech/blog/turso-0.8.0
In any case, this is on our radar and we do intend to improve it but not the highest priority right now.
> Add Turso (it is unbelievably slow) (it also does not work)
Ah Alexey, never change
Another PR:
> Turso - it is ridiculously slow, can't believe that: revert the single-transaction import, cap per-query wall-clock
I really, really hope that Turso survives this, and doesn't become another "incredible journey". I'm excited about Turso as a technology, both as a better sqlite and as something theoretically capable of becoming an embeddable postgres-compatible database.
I have only ever interfaced with sqlite querying databases created by other applications so I'm not really super familiar with the application development side of it, but I've only ever heard praise of sqlite. Out of pure curiosity, what would a better sqlite look like, aside from postgres compatibility mentioned?
More async, more concurrency, more dialects (not just postgres), better defaults, ability to be called from safe languages without going by way of an unsafe FFI layer, open community...
This is a really interesting idea. I had never considered this before.
This would allow you to write PostgreSQL queries that work against a flat file or a Postgres server. Am I understanding the potential benefit correctly?
If you are interested in that specifically, you may be a bit more interested in DuckDB’s growing support in this area: https://duckdb.org/2026/08/20/duckdb-20-peg-parser
Supabase is a great product, we use it for all of our products, but we also need OSS solutions that can be self-hosted. For Supabase, I hope the platform improves. SQLite has become the standard, we need that standard (other than the SQL93 part) to be created and maintained so that other can drop a paid for product and handle the server-side themselves is the choose to.
Agree. supabase is a great product for prototyping. Their free tier is really helpful. But the value of instant access to a real postgres db is also where inevitable pain comes from. A prototype is fun until it's not and I've never managed to maintain app-based side projects longer than a few months. Only static deployments survive.
Supabase was really early in the "throwaway full-stack environments" space. Very helpful but I find myself moving to edge networks with sqlite in spite of my dislike for javascript.
Isn't this what this sounds like? You self-host Turso at the start, and you can gracefully scale to managed Turso (cloud), then to managed Postgres (Supabase). And Turso has experimental support for a Postgres frontend (alongside the SQLite frontend).
^ this is exactly the plan. An appropriate stack for each part of your journey.
The blog post captures it really well:
> As agents build more software, we believe database demand will outpace the world’s current capacity to support them. So we need infrastructure that can scale to meet this growth and is suited to how we build with agents.
> Agents should be able to create a database as easily as creating a file, with just as little concern about cost. For smaller workloads, that shouldn’t require provisioning a dedicated machine every time. Databases should be cheap to create, available on demand, and have a clear path to production when needed.
> SQLite is well suited to these small, on-demand workloads. Postgres is what you want as your application scales. We want builders to have the same developer experience from prototyping to production.
Sqlite has become the standard? I've been out for a couple years but this is news to me. What does it mean though? Standard for what?
anecdotally I think this applies more specifically for 0-1 side-projects. They can be serious attempts at startups, but they start small and with AI the feedback loop should be rapid and fierce. For this you want lightweight infrastructure that the agent can reason about and not create a mess. So an edge network with sqlite is pretty killer.
This is great, I was a little worried that the turso project's future was tied to the success of turso the company and it has impacted a few of my technical choices and has resulted in me choosing sqlite over turso a few times.
I'll likely be choosing turso going forward for projects.
? are you seriously preferring a vibe coded project over the war tested sqlite?
1. I've looked at how Turso verifies the correctness of their db and I'm satisfied with it.
2. Turso supports features I want that don't exist and will not exist in sqlite.
I mean this is pretty obvious, I'm not using sqlite because it doesn't do what I want it to do. I also don't understand the repeated "sqlite is the best tested software" sentiment. I don't care if it's the best tested if it doesn't do what I want it to do.
> don't care if it's the best tested if it doesn't do what I want it to do.
That’s an interesting tradeoff, especially if this is a production grade application. Curious: what features is SQLite missing?
More to come, but Turso remains a product and SQLite remains their focus. Supabase/Postgres is the path as workloads grow and require it.
(disclosure: I work at supabase)
GGs to the team!
I'm a big fan of Glauber's work. He gives me the same neo-hacker vibe as Jarred, of Bun.
So this is pleasant news to me.
Why would you rewrite something that’s widely considered one of the best written and tested pieces of software in the world?
Among many other things, they built a system that can provide substantially better concurrency and a better async story.
Also, they're building a project that's more open to outsiders.
They were aiming for better concurrency, I believe. If you're rewriting something regardless, might as well use a more modern language that's easier to reason about during development.
I think Richard Hipp has quipped “if you think you can build a better SQLite by god you’re welcome to try!”
If yiu had the resources/time, why wouldn't you challenge or improve status quo?
Sqlite is excellent but I still have many gripes with it, especially around defaults.
The Rust rewrite? I had the same question.
It’s fast, with unparalleled stability, arguably better managed than any other software on earth, deployed on literally everything, so let’s… fork it for street cred?
Rewriting in Rust is usually an exercise in reducing serious security vulnerabilities and memory bugs, not improving speed or stability.
But with LLMs and massive, human-written test suites, rewrites aren’t a bad idea like they used to be. Rust is a perfect target language because it’s compiler is so strict and surfaces issues in a way that’s easy for either humans or LLMs to use.
Something tells me the test suites won't be human written, for most of them. They probably won't be fully human reviewed even.
For existing, mature projects like SQLite, the tests are human-written.
Even if they weren’t, LLMs are pretty good at writing tests because of Github being in their training sets. I rarely find that their tests are bad unless I underspecified what the project is supposed to do.
Disclaimer that I only vibe-code for personal projects, so I haven’t tested this at business scale.
Best tested..? The test data/suite is private. That alone is quite odd.
It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model. Much better than letting VC + SV rat fuck everything for solitary monetary gain.
> It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model.
The purpose of SQLite's governance model is to be a cult, that only accepts members who share the same religion.
The software happens to be good. Getting it away from that governance and turning it into an open community sounds great. And that can happen while still maintaining high standards.
No, this is just sour grapes because you clearly disagree with people that don't adhere to your ideology. Thank fuck for that, people like you are why devs get burnt out.
Another way of describing Turso is a SQLite-compatible (same file format and C API) embedded database. If you start with SQLite but find you need async i/o, concurrent writers, and local replicas then Turso is a good option.
Because they wanted something like this story to happen. It's what VC does to open source, they aren't here to help or build communities they are here to make money. Nothing else matters.
We're seeing a lot of acquisitions in this space. First Electric (pglite) was acquired by DataBricks (Neon) now this.
I use Turso for a small project. Seems to work well. Hope this doesn’t change
I’ve been watching Turso for a while. A very exciting project, and I’m excited to see what comes with the acquisition (especially seeing as Glauber’s stoked by it.)
Congrats! The team is very based and I've learned a lot contributing to Turso, amazing people
Always been a fan of Supabase, but didn't expect this. Curious to see what comes of it!
Any guesses on how much they paid?
I do not feel good about this. I really want SQLite (and the Turso re-write of it) to win for tiny apps that people will build more and more with LLMs. Desktop or server. Even serverless.
The core tech is open source so that is good. Will it stay? I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?
Turso CEO here. We were doing fine.
This is a strategic acquisition and I fell in love with the vision Supabase had for how they would use Turso going forward.
More to come
Thanks but you do understand this makes it hard for folks to select Turso. With all good intentions parent companies kill acquisitions.
Supabase is hosted Postgres with wings. Turso seemed like it would be the same but using SQLite based approach.
So either Supabase now uses the Turso sync + Postgres or something that needs Turso or abandons it. Not sure and I am not asking, just sharing my thoughts.
Love what you folks have been doing.
I also have my own doubts about this acquisition, but as I explore sqlite-per-user models I'm also seeing benefits to having some central control plane. I thought they would've made a natural fit on Cloudflare.
Did you check out the post? Supabase sees Turso as the answer to workloads not well-suited for Postgres. This seems like a decent Yes, And proposition.
Or Supabase starts offering "SQLite" (Turso) as they are offering PG today?
yup — we see Turso/SQLite as complementary to Postgres for specific use cases. The blog post doesn't mention it yet, but this will power our smallest instance — "Spark" https://x.com/saltcod/status/2106078176464036044
> I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?
I would guess it's more that the founders want to exit before AI replaces them. (Based on the doom-and-gloom narrative in tech right now...)
I am fully onboard with LLM generated code if that is what you mean. I literally get client work titled "Need Claude led Engineer". SQLite is a great option for the LLM enabled future.
> Turso will continue operating, with a clear path into the broader Supabase ecosystem as workloads grow.
You mean, it has never happened that an acquiring company said this and then closed the acquired tech?
I has happened, but supabase has a history of keeping things open source and Turso keeping its sqlite-focused mission is the plan.
(disclaimer, supabase employee)
> The core tech is open source so that is good. Will it stay? I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?
You just answered your own question. Why would anyone pay for Turso if the core of the software is available for free and being licenced permissively under MIT?
Because they don't want to self-host/manage it. It looks like this is an acquisition, not an acquihire, so it's unclear whether or not Turso was making enough to sustain itself or not. There are plenty of companies out there who release open source software and make money off of hosted/managed offerings of it.
Turso CEO here.
We were doing fine.
This is a strategic acquisition and I fell in love with the vision Supabase had for how they would use Turso going forward.
More to come
Liability. Compliance. Chain-of-responsibility. Risk. This has always been the case in business, and it will continue to be the case (at least until artificial intelligence actually replaces that need).
Huh? Supabase is also that. Lots of tech is like this. Parent company makes money from hosting, services, enterprise feature seats, etc.
We use Turso for async in Rust projects. It's performance has been very good. Looking forward to what comes from this
I didn't know the company, but it turns out they have a great mindset.
Could be fun.made product on top of it.Pro plan is still too much, but free quota is too little.having a hard time balancing my hobby project.Still there's not really many alternatives, so probably we'll stick with it.Decent service.
By "it" you mean Turso? Maybe you can help since I don't understand what they offer. What does Turso do that SQLite doesn't?
it's glommer
I feel like this makes a lot of sense and is a rare win-win-win (supabase-turso-customers being the parties).
Open source never pays the bills, nor do users here ever pay for open source.
nide for a rust project !
UGH as a turso customer, I do not want this.
Write me a message to my email directly or hit me up on Discord.
We are very excited to be a part of Supabase
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Nooooooooo
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