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SQLite for Rivet Actors

one database per agent, tenant, or document

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Hey HN! We posted Rivet Actors here previously [1] as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects.Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0).Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document.Useful for:- AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings- Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks- Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer- Per-user databases: isolated, scales horizontally, runs at the edgeThe idea of splitting data per entity isn't new: Cassandra and DynamoDB use partition keys to scale horizontally, but you're stuck with rigid schemas ("single-table design" [3]), limited queries, and painful migrations. SQLite per entity gives you the same scalability without those tradeoffs [2].How this compares:- Cloudflare Durable Objects & Agents: most similar to Rivet Actors with colocated SQLite and compute, but closed-source and vendor-locked- Turso Cloud: Great platform, but closed-source + diff use case. Clients query over the network, so reads are slow or stale. Rivet's single-writer actor model keeps reads local and fresh.- D1, Turso (the DB), Litestream, rqlite, LiteFS: great tools for running a single SQLite database with replication. Rivet is for running lots of isolated databases.Under the hood, SQLite runs in-process with each actor. A custom VFS persists writes to HA storage (FoundationDB or Postgres).Rivet Actors also provide realtime (WebSockets), React integration (useActor), horizontal scalability, and actors that sleep when idle.GitHub: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivetDocs: https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/sqlite/[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472519[2] https://rivet.dev/blog/2025-02-16-sqlite-on-the-server-is-mi...[3] https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/dynamodb-single-table/

HN · launched Feb 28, 2026 · 45 upvotes (top 20%) · 1 view

Niche: database management systems and engines · 162 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -17% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Data infrastructure
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Building distributed actor infrastructure with micro-SQLite database virtualization at scale requires deep distributed systems, database internals, and hypervisor/sandbox engineering.

What it would actually take: The architecture involves a distributed actor runtime (similar to Orleans or Cloudflare DO) coordinating millions of embedded SQLite databases across a cluster, managing consensus, replication (like LiteFS or Raft), and instant cold-start containerization/Wasm isolation. The hard parts are multi-tenant resource isolation, cross-node migration of open file descriptors, and split-brain resolution during actor state replication. This requires elite distributed systems and database storage engine engineers.

Discussion

16 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Cloudflare Durable Objects, Erlang/OTP, Elixir, DuckDB

Concerns raised: Lazy migration performance impact when migrations require heavy backfilling or index rebuilding, Can't pre-migrate millions of idle databases due to on-demand wake model, Per-actor SQLite may be inefficient compared to logical separation in larger DB, Cross-tenant/cross-actor queries not well supported by per-database model, Reimplementing database transactions across actor boundaries

Feature requests: Comparison documentation against Cloudflare Durable Objects in README, Query engine to operate over multiple databases, Expose Rivet SQLite as DuckDB datasource, Versioned read paths serving old-schema data during background migrations, Preemptive scheduler with system-wide fairness and starvation prevention

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 185 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #61 of 186 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 122 days after the earliest competitor.

  • Durable Actors · hn · 2026-10-06 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.56
  • kassette · hn · 2026-07-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • Moogo · ph · 2026-10-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • Turbolite · hn · 2026-03-26 · 185 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • Wolbarg · hn · 2026-07-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • Terse - Durable Actors · ph · 2026-11-09 · 71 upvotes · similarity 0.43
  • durable-object-migrator · github · 2026-10-28 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.43
  • SNKV · hn · 2026-02-24 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.42

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