Inside Turso's MVCC: the birth and death of a row, from bytecode to checkpoint
glcst · x · 2026-10-20
A Turso engineer published a deep dive on how a row lives and dies under Turso's MVCC: from parsing a statement and building VM bytecode, through execution and durable commit, to checkpoint deletion.
Key points:
- Turso's MVCC is based on the Hekaton design (Larson et al.), but that paper only covers in-memory structures — redo logs, recovery, and checkpoints had to be designed from scratch.
- Since Turso is a SQLite rewrite, on-disk data stays SQLite-compatible, making the switch from WAL mode to MVCC mode easy.
- The post ships alongside the news that Turso is joining Supabase to give every agent its own database.
- Framed with a Marcus Aurelius joke about write-ahead logging and stoic MVCC.
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