Simon Willison’s Weblog

15th December 2024 - Link Blog

In search of a faster SQLite (via) Turso developer Avinash Sajjanshetty (previously) shares notes on the April 2024 paper Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O by Turso founder and CTO Pekka Enberg, Jon Crowcroft, Sasu Tarkoma and Ashwin Rao.

The theme of the paper is rearchitecting SQLite for asynchronous I/O, and Avinash describes it as "the foundational paper behind Limbo, the SQLite rewrite in Rust."

From the paper abstract:

We propose rearchitecting SQLite to provide asynchronous byte-code instructions for I/O to avoid blocking in the library and de-coupling the query and storage engines to facilitate database and serverless runtime co-design. Our preliminary evaluation shows up to a 100x reduction in tail latency, suggesting that our approach is conducive to runtime/database co-design for low latency.