Edge Databases with Glauber Costa

Picture a user interacting with a web app on their phone. When they tap the screen the app triggers communication with a server, which in turn communicates with a database. This process then happens in reverse to eventually update what the user sees on-screen. The latency for this round trip depends a lot on the physical distance between the user and the server. In a traditional web app, latency can be especially poor when the user and the server are separated by an ocean, and they must communicate through an underwater trans-oceanic link. However, with edge computing, multiple servers and data centers create a distributed system that greatly improves response times.

Turso is an edge-hosted, distributed database based on libSQL, an open-source and open-contribution fork of SQLite. It was designed to minimize query latency for applications where queries come from anywhere in the world. Glauber Costa is the Founder and CEO of Turso and he joins us in this episode.