Rewriting SQLite from prison with Preston Thorpe

Database School

In this episode of Database School, Aaron talks with Preston Thorpe, a senior engineer at Turso who is currently incarcerated, about his incredible journey from prison to rewriting SQLite in Rust. They dive deep into concurrent writes, MVCC, and the challenges of building a new database from scratch while discussing redemption, resilience, and raw technical brilliance.

Follow Preston and Turso:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/PThorpe92
Preston's Blog: https://pthorpe92.dev
GitHub: https://github.com/PThorpe92
Turso: https://turso.tech

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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro and Preston’s story
02:13 - How Preston learned programming in prison
06:06 - Making his parents proud and turning life around
09:01 - Getting his first job at Unlock Labs
10:47 - Discovering Turso and contributing to open source
12:53 - From contributor to senior engineer at Turso
22:27 - What Preston works on inside Turso
24:00 - Challenges of rewriting SQLite in Rust
26:00 - Why concurrent writes matter
27:57 - How Turso implements concurrent writes
35:02 - Maintaining SQLite compatibility
37:03 - MVCC explained simply
43:40 - How Turso handles MVCC and logging
46:03 - Open source contributions and performance work
46:23 - Implementing live materialized views
50:55 - The DBSP paper and incremental computation
52:55 - Sync and offline capabilities in Turso
56:45 - Change data capture and future possibilities
1:02:01 - Implementing foreign keys and fuzz testing
1:06:02 - Rebuilding SQLite’s virtual machine
1:08:10 - The quirks of SQLite’s codebase
1:10:47 - Preston’s upcoming release and what’s next
1:14:02 - Gratitude, reflection, and closing thoughts