"Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite"

That's not entirely true. SQLite has a TON of tests that are part of the public domain project: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/test

They do have a test suite that's private which I understand to be more about testing for different hardware - they sell access to that for companies that want SQLite to work on their custom embedded hardware, details here: https://sqlite.org/th3.html

> SQLite Test Harness #3 (hereafter "TH3") is one of three test harnesses used for testing SQLite.

> 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from:

I’ve been confused by this for a while. What is it competing with? Surely not SQLite, being client server defeats all the latency benefits. I feel it would be considered as an alternative to cloud Postgres offerings, and it seems unlikely they could compete on features. Genuinely curious, but is there any sensible use case for this product, or do they just catch people who read SQLite was good on hacker news, but didn’t understand any of the why.

The thing that cooks my noodle - who are these insane people who want to beta test a new database? Yes, all databases could have world destroying data loss/corruption, but I have significantly more confidence in a player than has been on the market for many years.

The article talks about this. If you have a project that starts small and an in-process DB is fine, but you end up needing to scale up then you don't have to switch DBs.

That's a valid, but very tiny, use case.

After all, if you can tell in advance that you might hit the limits of SQLite, you'd simply start with postgresql on day one, not with a new unproven DB vendor with a product that has been through the trial by fire of existing DBs.

So the usecase is: I started with SQLite, but now I have too many terrabytes to fit on one server? That seems.. very uncommon.

And since moving it out of process, and even to another network, is going to make it much much much slower. You're going to need a rewrite anyway

I think it's more like you started with SQLite and now you need concurrent writes, replication, sharding, etc. etc. - all the stuff that the "big" databases like PostgreSQL provide.

Thanks. Serves me right for commenting without reading the article.

> Genuinely curious, but is there any sensible use case for this product

Looking at the comments each time this product comes up, Rust is apparently the selling point for many, including the dev team themselves.

Elasticsearch was license under Apache 2.0 until they switched.

That says enough.

to AGPL3?

Are there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)

Grafana has been a pretty good steward of OSS. Whether you like their products or not, they've been able to balance the OSS and commercial offerings fairly well.

Yeah that's something I actually use quite a bit!

Whether or not they attempt rug pulls, or other slimy measures to extort money from entrenched users... this VC backed OSS startups have given us some nice things. People fork the permissively licensed code when the scumbuckets get too smelly and the company goes on to irrelevancy while people use the actually OSS version.

metabase.com, but metabase is intended for business analyst types and is AGPL, with shenanigans for embedding and an enterprise edition thing

Man, I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great. Like, doing a massive join across 10 tables and selecting all the columns from all the tables - to only return the average of one column from one table.

So what? The MIT licensed original will still be there, you don't lose out on anything if that happens. And also, SQLite itself is public domain, so by your logic we shouldn't trust SQLite either. Which is crazy.

I don't understand you reply here. Database startups have always had the consistent issue of cloud providers providing managed solutions without contributing back. It is why many moved to or use the AGPLv3 and why there was the whole SSPL controversy in the first place. Running a successful open source database startup is not trivial. None of this applies to SQLite.

I think the point is that that sounds like a potential problem for turso, but it’s not really a problem for everyone else unless some sort of vendor lockin would prevent using open source alternatives. But given the strong compatibility story with the SQLite file format implied already that just doesn’t seem credible.

Yeah I am really not speaking in terms of a risk for all end users, just those who may rely on turso as a company. To assume a startup, no matter how well funded, will survive is naive. There are historically a lot of issues with this business model. This is not a certain failure, but we cannot ignore the challenges companies in a similar space have faced.

> test suite which is something lacking in SQLite

You must be kidding. Last time I checked, sqlite was mostly extensive test suites.

It's covered in the article. The full SQLite test suite isn't open source, so you (the third party) don't have the same confidence in your modifications as the SQLite team does.

1. Only if you modify it. There is a free test suit, and You can license the non-free test suit.

2. Compare to the test in Turso, the test in Turso is just kids toy.

I think they meant that the test suite is not open source. You’re right that it is extensive.