Stoolap: High-performance embedded SQL database in pure Rust
21 comments
·December 12, 2025Sytten
egorfine
It's not a rewrite of SQLite in Rust.
It's an entirely new project that happens to have some compatibility with one of the popular SQL databases, namely SQLite.
forgotpwd16
From the devs themselves[0]:
>Our goal is to build a reimplementation of SQLite from scratch, fully compatible at the language and file format level, with the same or higher reliability SQLite is known for, but with full memory safety and on a new, modern architecture.
And they call it rewrite in a recent followup post[1].
[0]: https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-limbo-a-complete-rewrite...
[1]: https://turso.tech/blog/we-will-rewrite-sqlite-and-we-are-go...
Arcuru
> Time-Travel Queries: Query historical data at any point in time:
The example here looks like it may be storing the full history of transactions? Is that right? That's a pretty high cost to pay for something that's not touted as a marquee feature.
I'm working on a DB[1] that stores full transaction history but it's so that I can support decentralized synchronization. It's in service of my marquee feature so I need to pay the cost of storing history, but I'm surprised that Stoolap also seems to be doing it for a local embedded database.
rich_sasha
I would imagine (but haven't looked at it at all) that it's a byproduct of an append only data format. Then having a historical PoV is cheap - you simply disregard changes after a certain time.
Append-only has many other benefits, including zero contention between many readers and (single) writers. In the vanilla version, writers still contend though.
edf13
Sounds very interesting - I’ve used SQLite in a few Rust based projects where performance was the deciding factor… a perf comparison with this would be very useful
DoctorOW
Comments especially feel vibe coded. Not necessarily bad, just not something I would trust with prod data.
/// Create a new empty row
pub fn new() -> Self {
Self { values: Vec::new() }
}Klonoar
This particular bit doesn't scream vibe-coded to me at all.
In fact it looks like a generic comment I'd write and come back to later.
jdub
What an impressive release!
It makes me very curious.
Delivered to GitHub fully-formed: A grand total of 9 commits (mostly docs and CI fixes), all in the last 5 hours, and v0.1.0 released 3 hours ago.
No external database/storage-layer dependencies, so it's not "just" a CLI/server/parser wrapper around other libraries doing the "real work".
It appears to have a substantial test suite (76% code coverage, not skipping the scary bits), and great documentation.
There's a bit of context on https://github.com/stoolap but not much else about the author, project goals, relationship to other systems, e.g. it could be the data layer for something else.
(Interestingly, there's an archived stoolap-go repo with a very similar Go implementation of a columnar/hybrid database, so this is not the author's "first draft".)
esafak
I too am curious how to the first commit came about: https://github.com/stoolap/stoolap/commit/768eb836de0ff072b8...
Note to owner: CI is broken.
forgotpwd16
Can assume they worked on this last few months when they stopped development in the, now archived, Go attempt, but they scrapped the entire git history on publication. Still, even if consider heavy AI use, looks like they put quite the effort in this.
dash2
I think the name is not good. It sounds like "stool app". Among other things, "stool" means poo.
duttish
Yea, my first association was stool -> poo.
I've been trying to think of what other meaning they could have gone for but got nothing. Stoo lap? Sto olap?
null
kolektiv
Another voice basically begging them to change the name here, yeah. It might be quite interesting as a tool, but please...
null
ITniggah
'Stool-', yes stool it is. What's next? Fudgepacka?
rich_sasha
Looks very interesting!
Some comparison to another embedded SQL DB, i.e. sqlite3, would be useful. How abusable is it? What tradeoffs are taken? Etc.
sudarshnachakra
Does this support concurrent writers (unlike sqlite)? Quite an impressive feature set for a one-person project.
Also is this a single file DB? If so is the format stable?
seg_lol
Initial release: Stoolap - A Modern Embedded SQL Database in Pure Rust
Stoolap is a high-performance embedded SQL database featuring:
Core Features:
- Full ACID transactions with MVCC (READ COMMITTED & SNAPSHOT isolation)
- Cost-based query optimizer with adaptive execution
- Parallel query execution via Rayon
- 101+ built-in functions (string, math, date/time, JSON, aggregate, window)
- Multiple index types: B-tree, Hash, Bitmap (auto-selected or explicit)
- Multi-column composite indexes
- WAL + snapshots with crash recovery
SQL Support:
- JOINs (INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL OUTER, CROSS)
- Subqueries (scalar, IN, EXISTS, correlated)
- Common Table Expressions (WITH and WITH RECURSIVE)
- Window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD, etc.)
- ROLLUP, CUBE, GROUPING SETS
- Temporal queries (AS OF TIMESTAMP/TRANSACTION)
- Views, RETURNING clause, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
104K lines of Rust | No C dependencies | Full documentation at stoolap.iohuflungdung
[dead]
In the same area, I am tracking the Rust rewrite of sqlite by Turso [1]. The big advantage is the file format compatibility.
[1] https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso