The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Turso is rewriting SQLite in Rust (Interview)
Thu, 30 Jan 2025
Glauber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Turso, joins us to discuss libSQL, Limbo, and how they're rewriting SQLite in Rust. We discuss their efforts with libSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain but not being open for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Turso platform, how they test Limbo with Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), and their plan to replace SQLite.
Full Episode
What's up, welcome back. This is The Change Log. We feature the hackers, the leaders, and those replacing SQLite. Yes, today we're joined by Glaber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Terso. Terso is an open source distributed database powered by LibSQL. which is described as the open contribution fork of SQLite.
We discussed their efforts with LibSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain and not having an opportunity for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Terzo platform, how they test Limbo with deterministic simulation testing, also known as DST, and their plan to replace SQLite.
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Well, friends, before the show, I'm here with my good friend, David Shu, over at Retool. Now, David, I've known about Retool for a very long time. You've been working with us for many, many years. And speaking of many, many years, Brex is one of your oldest customers. You've been in business almost seven years.
I think they've been a customer of yours for almost all those seven years, to my knowledge. But share the story. What do you do for Brex? How does Brex leverage Retool? And why have they stayed with you all these years?
So what's really interesting about Brex is that they are an extremely operational heavy company. And so for them, the quality of the internal tools is so important because you can imagine they have to deal with fraud, they have to deal with underwriting, they have to deal with so many problems basically. They have a giant team internally basically just using internal tools day in and day out.
And so they have a very high bar for internal tools. And when they first started, we were in the same YC batch, actually. We were both at Winter 17. And they were, yeah, I think maybe customer number five or something like that for us. I think DoorDash was a little bit before them, but they were pretty early.
And the problem they had was they had so many internal tools they needed to go and build, but not enough time or engineers to go build all of them. And even if they did have the timer engineers, they wanted their engineers focused on building external facing software because that is what would drive the business forward. Brex mobile app, for example, is awesome.
The Brex website, for example, is awesome. The Brex expense flow, all really, you know, really great external facing software. So they wanted their engineers focused on that as opposed to building internal CRUD UIs. And so that's why they came to us. And it was awesome. Honestly, a wonderful partnership. It has been for seven, eight years now.
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