Turbolite
Sqlite extension in Developer tools
A free SQLite storage layer that serves cold queries from S3 by grouping touched pages into contiguous reads, which people find surprisingly fast for the latency it accepts.
A free SQLite storage layer that serves cold queries from S3 by grouping touched pages into contiguous reads, which people find surprisingly fast for the latency it accepts.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 1 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 1 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fewer round trips via grouped reads
“Group the pages a query actually touches into contiguous segments and you turn dozens of round trips into a few sequential reads.”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” “optimizing request count instead of byte efficiency”
Comment from 29 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” Fast for cold point reads and joins
“250ms is slow for a DB query though but for what you are doing and how you donit it is surprisingly fast.”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” “Cold point reads and small joins seem more plausible than I expected.”
Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” “For the use case I'm targeting, the read locality wins dominate.”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” Quick compared to other options
“yeah it's definitely slow, but compared to other options it's quite fast”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3” “Point is - it's not too bad, and that's kind of worst-case scenario”
Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Cold queries are still slow
“yeah it's definitely slow, but compared to other options it's quite fast”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3”
What people recommend instead
The same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Honker | 17 | 1 | 94% | 2 | — | — |
| TurboliteThis page | 9 | 0 | 100% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
9 of the 13 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“optimizing request count instead of byte efficiency”
“yeah it's definitely slow, but compared to other options it's quite fast”
“For the use case I'm targeting, the read locality wins dominate.”
“250ms is slow for a DB query though but for what you are doing and how you donit it is surprisingly fast.”
“I appreciate that you're running benchmarks on real object storage setups”
“Group the pages a query actually touches into contiguous segments and you turn dozens of round trips into a few sequential reads.”
“Point is - it's not too bad, and that's kind of worst-case scenario”
“I really appreciate this post. Freely and humbly sharing real insights from an interesting project.”
“Cold point reads and small joins seem more plausible than I expected.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.