Operational databases

The umbrella for this spoke: transactional / operational (OLTP) databases and the tooling around them. These are the row-oriented stores that sit in the request path of an application — handling many small reads and writes with transactional guarantees — as opposed to the analytical / OLAP columnar stores that answer big aggregate queries (owned by the sibling analytical-databases in ../analytical-databases-wiki). The OLTP vs OLAP split is the spoke’s founding boundary.

The founding shape

The three founding sources trace a spectrum plus its tooling:

• Embedded end — turso: an in-process, SQLite-compatible OLTP engine (a Rust rewrite of SQLite). The database is a library linked into the app; no server.
• Distributed end — planetscale-768-servers: sharding a MySQL/Postgres database with Vitess/Neki so hundreds of servers present as one logical database.
• The tooling around them — awesome-db-tools: a catalog of ~200+ tools for working with databases (clients, migration, backup, monitoring, security), spanning all engine types.

Past the embedded end (added 2026-07-29)

local-first-architecture extends the spectrum one hop further than turso: the OLTP store moves out of the server process entirely and into the client, with the server reduced to a sync log. livestore is the artifact (event-sourcing log → materialized client-side SQLite), and the sync engine — not the database — is where the design decisions now sit rethinking-data-client-event-sourcing.

The through-line

Both engine sources are the same job at opposite scales: serve transactional SQL. Turso shrinks the database to a single in-process library; PlanetScale grows it across a sharded fleet. The tension they bracket is how far a single logical database can stretch before it must either disappear into the process (turso) or fan out across machines (database-sharding) — with a whole tooling ecosystem (awesome-db-tools) filling the operational gap between “it runs” and “it runs in production.”

Related

online-transaction-processing · database-sharding · turso · planetscale-768-servers · awesome-db-tools · analytical-databases · synthesis