Turso, the cloud database company that rewrote SQLite from scratch in Rust, has begun a new project to build a Postgres-compatible database on the same technical foundation. The move builds on the virtual machine architecture underpinning Turso's SQLite reimplementation, which the company believes can be extended beyond one database format to serve as a shared core for multiple SQL and NoSQL frontends, including potentially MySQL and Redis.

Turso originated as ChiselStrike, a startup founded by former ScyllaDB engineers Glauber Costa and Pekka Enberg, who first forked SQLite as libSQL before undertaking a full rewrite, initially codenamed Limbo. The rewrite centres on a bytecode-based Virtual Database Engine (VDBE) that compiles SQL queries, which the founders argue is expressive enough to replicate any database system, not just SQLite; they previously demonstrated this by running the video game DOOM through the engine. Costa has described the ambition as making Turso "the LLVM of databases", with one core engine supporting many database frontends, while stressing that the Postgres effort is not a criticism of Postgres itself but an attempt to adapt it for cloud-native use.