Astro chooses Turso to power Astro DB
Astro, the leading framework for the content web, chooses Turso to power Astro DB
Astro is the go-to web framework for content-driven websites. Developers love Astro because of its innovative Islands architecture, and for its efficiency in shipping only the minimum amount of Javascript required to the client. Thanks to Turso, Astro now ships with Astro DB, a database abstraction that makes managing the website's content a breeze.
Astro excels at content. But at the end of the day, content is just another name for data. And data can exist in many places, shapes, and formats. Having a unified way of manipulating all of the data a website needs is no easy task.
Thankfully, our industry has had a tool for that for decades: databases! But what if each collection of items a user wants to represent could be its own database? This would provide users with a unified view and query language that can then be exposed through an abstraction.
Traditionally, creating databases has been an expensive operation. Furthermore, requiring users to set up databases locally to develop with Astro would be a level of friction developers would be unlikely to accept.
The Astro team reached for SQLite for its characteristics: each database is just a file, so creating a database per data source is doable. It can also be integrated deeply into the application, since it is just a library and is always on.
But SQLite by itself doesn't solve all problems. While the approach of just shipping SQLite files works well for immutable data, you still need to handle cases where data can be written to, keeping the SQLite files in sync. For production, there is also the need to build infrastructure to handle disaster recovery, replication, and many other things.
While the Astro team initially experimented with Cloudflare D1, Turso fit the bill the best. With Turso, Astro was able to use the same libSQL drivers to provide local read only experiences as well as remote databases to the tune of one per project, and in the browser for Stackblitz-based examples, with the libSQL wasm build.
Using Turso, we were able to expand our ambitions. Suddenly we had a database that worked everywhere without any extra dependencies or services. That allowed us to rethink the product in a way that makes the database a core part of the experience, that is always there.
If you are a fan of Astro, check their Astro DB product, now powered by Turso. And if you too want to take advantage of the innovative architectures that having millions of databases that work from anywhere can unlock, get in touch now!
