Show HN: A Database Written in Golang
79 comments
·February 26, 2025alecco
Cool!
You watched CMU's intro to Database sytems, right? It's really good and thorough. It will save you of some common pitfalls and can help you navigate the trade-offs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otE2WvX3XdQ&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...
Tostino
I really have liked the current Optimizer series. So much amazing info.
I hope some company that heavily relies on Postgres sponsors a project to replace the optimizer with a more modern implementation. I feel like for any large applications with olap style queries (even if on the OLTP database) will benefit incredibly from that work. SQL Servers optimizer was light-years ahead of Postgres when I worked with it last over a decade ago.
alecco
Sadly, most of those corporations would rather spend millions in proprietary solutions than give back 100k to the community. I've seen it first hand many times. They only give money if they absolutely have to.
skrtskrt
I also recommend "Database Internals" to people. An invaluable book, the logical next read after "Designing Data-Intensive Applications". It's the best and most approachable resource on distributed systems and database consistency / performance tradeoffs I have found.
BiraIgnacio
Oh thanks for the link, this is really great!
Sahil121
sure man
hobs
Looks fun, but the intro requirement is "Knows C++" - that's kinda a non starter right?
alecco
I'm sure that's for the homework.
sieabahlpark
[dead]
dveeden2
Other databases written in Go:
- TiDB by PingCAP
- Vitess by PlanetScale
Both are basically only the SQL part as TiDB uses TiKV (written in Rust) and Vitess uses MySQL.
For those who want to implement a database in Go but without having to implement a network protocol there is go-mysql, which allows you to do this: https://github.com/go-mysql-org/go-mysql/blob/master/cmd/go-... As demonstration I created a networked SQLite: https://github.com/dveeden/go-mysql-examples/blob/main/go-my...
Both TiDB and Vitess have parsers that can be used outside standalone. So if you only want to implement your own on disk format, this can help.
Note that I'm working for PingCAP on TiDB and I'm also a co-maintainer for go-mysql.
aqueueaqueue
We use Tidb at work at scale. Great product! Was looking at the source today to understand an error code.
raggi
Vitess came from YouTube
CBLT
Didn't the Vitess team found planetscale?
harshitgangal
Yes! The founders of PlanetScale were the co-creators of Vitess at YouTube, where it was built to handle MySQL scalability. PlanetScale builds on Vitess but offers a managed, developer-friendly experience.
twalla
Someone asked about resources and I ran into this while evaluating embedded db options for a golang project - it's a collection of db components implemented in golang:
tjungblut
thank you for referring, feel free to ask any questions you may have
littlemerman
You might be interested in this golang db from mit’s database systems course:
https://github.com/MIT-DB-Class/go-db-2024 https://dsg.csail.mit.edu/6.5830/
Sahil121
will surely checkout thanks man
mbreese
This looks like a good exploratory project!
One thing I’d add to the readme is an example of how you’d use the database in an example application. From the docs, it’s clear that this isn’t a sql database (yet?), so it would be good to have an example to see how to use the database.
It might also be nice to have a description of what happens when you insert or get a record, so others can learn from the code too. Or can you comment here about what your favorite part of the code is? What did you figure out that you didn’t know before? If you’re using the project to learn about databases, what have you learned so far?
Sahil121
thanks man yes currently it is not a fully sql database (have to add query support) My fav part of code is the data retrieval code because had some issues there & got to know lot about it
Learnt about B+ Trees, transactions, managing concurrent reads & data presistence
voodooEntity
I didnt look into it yet but i already wanted to say - cuz of curiosity i build my own graph database in golang :) and i learned alot. so i absolutly understand why you did it and what experiences you probably made on the way :D
congratz !
varelaseb
Is this published anywhere?
voodooEntity
Kinda. So first i went for a standalone application back than to use it as storage/database. This part is archived now. it was released under: https://github.com/voodooEntity/slingshotdb
At this point i think its important to mention that its nativly an in-memory graph database/storage.
At some point (4-5 years ago) i decided to change the way i handle it. Since im using the storage in many private projects, and there was no real traction (while also maintaining a database is quite some work) i decided i gonne change the way i handle it away from a standalone database to a library that works as an in-memory graph storage.
Also i added a custom query language including builder (the queries are 100% json compatible so you can in theory build queries from whatever language and transmit it via json.
The library is released under : https://github.com/voodooEntity/gits
Currently im completly reworking the query parser but since this is a privat project and im the only maintainer it may take some to to finish it. The update will takle some smaller bugs in the query parser that can occur on very complex nested queries and also will optimize query speeds. I cant provide a date when the update will occure i only can say it will (because i need it myself).
Finally said: The strength of gits is to be very fast (hence in memory handling) and easy to use from golang. Its threadsafe by default.
Sahil121
thanks man
bob1029
If you are wanting proper SQL command support, you could copy the SQLite parser approach. Properly parsing all valid command texts is not a problem that I would find compelling unless I was being compensated for it.
https://www.sqlite.org/lemon.html
You could probably use something like participle, but you'd have to translate the grammar.
qaq
You can use https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroachdb-parser which is basically PGSQL compatible parser implemented in golang
mingodad
I do have a big collection of LALR(1) grammars to test/study/develop/document here https://mingodad.github.io/parsertl-playground/playground/ including sqlite, tidb, vites, postgresql, mysql, ...
Sahil121
yes man have to work on adding the sql cmd support thanks for the links
pighive
Nice, did you follow a course or any resources to build it? Please share, I have a similar goal. Thank you.
rebelmackerel
I took a quick glance at the code, I believe it may build upon "Build Your Own Database From Scratch in Go" [0]. The first part of the book is available for free on the author's website, along with information on how to purchase the full book (which includes source code).
I share the same goal and am working through the material after working through Codecrafters' "Build your own SQLite" [1]. Good luck!
I apologize in advance for mistakes (formatting, et cetera). I just registered this account to point you toward resources I found helpful.
croskcool
Does something like this exist for java, don't want to take the burden of a new language.
rebelmackerel
I don't think these things really fit the bill, but this is closest I could find. All the codecrafters stuff is focused on reading from a sqlite DB. A great start, but you're not implementing B+ trees.
Hope this gives you some options.
https://github.com/Arminas42/build_your_own_database
https://github.com/search?q=codecrafters+sqlite-java+languag...
lionkor
it's not that hard, you should try it :)
0x3331
Looks like a start. Keep it up, keep learning. Definitely check out https://www.youtube.com/c/CMUDatabaseGroup
Great lectures on relational databases and more.
fipar
Congratulations on a great exploratory project!
It takes me back to my school years. I never got as far as you (not by any long stretch actually), but I did enjoy creating the storage layer of a database from scratch. To actually have to deal with, instead of just think of, all the edge cases, is quite the transformative experience.
As a humble suggestion, since it seems your goal is to understand how relational databases work and not necessarily to write a new database that will compete with others, maybe don't make it an SQL one? We've got enough of those, and not enough of the others. Would be nice to have a new relational DB using Tutorial D as its language for example.
Keep hacking!
Sahil121
thanks for the suggestion man, will definitely think about this
hsnice16
This is so nice!
I created an email verifier project in Go to check MX records, SMTP server status, and existence in the disposable list.
null
Recently created a minimal persistent relational database in Go. Main focus was on implementing & understanding working the of database, storage management & transaction handling. Use of B+ Tree for storage engine(support for indexing), managing a Free List (for reusing nodes), Support for transactions, Concurrent Reads. Still have many things to add & fix like query processing being one of the main & fixing some bugs
Repo link - https://github.com/Sahilb315/AtomixDB
Would love to hear your thoughts