SurrealDB open-sources SurrealKV 1.0, a Rust storage engine 8x faster than RocksDB
mattturck · x · 2026-10-14
SurrealDB released SurrealKV 1.0, an open-source (Apache 2.0) persistent storage engine written in Rust that will replace RocksDB as the only storage engine in SurrealDB 4.
With synchronous durability (every commit flushed to disk), it benchmarks 7.95x faster reads, 6.10x faster updates, and 26.8x faster creates than RocksDB, and 73.7x faster reads than SlateDB.
The gains come from three design choices:
- A concurrent adaptive radix-tree memtable instead of the skiplists used by RocksDB/Pebble
- A commit ring that validates transactions in parallel and commits bursts with a single WAL append and at most one fsync
- Cheap reads that only pin a sequence number
It also offers opt-in versioned trees (point-in-time reads, retention-based compaction) and value separation for large values. The motivation: RocksDB is a large C++ dependency they can't control, while SurrealKV is fully owned and shippable as a Rust crate.
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