Limbo

Limbo is a work-in-progress, in-process OLTP database management system, compatible with SQLite.

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Features

Limbo is an in-process OLTP database engine library that has:

• Asynchronous I/O support on Linux with io_uring
• SQLite compatibility [doc] for SQL dialect, file formats, and the C API
• Language bindings for JavaScript/WebAssembly, Rust, Go, Python, and Java
• OS support for Linux, macOS, and Windows

Getting Started

💻 Command Line

You can install the latest limbo release with:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo/releases/latest/download/limbo-installer.sh | sh

Then launch the shell to execute SQL statements:

Limbo
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
Connected to a transient in-memory database.
Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database
limbo> CREATE TABLE users (id INT PRIMARY KEY, username TEXT);
limbo> INSERT INTO users VALUES (1, 'alice');
limbo> INSERT INTO users VALUES (2, 'bob');
limbo> SELECT * FROM users;
1|alice
2|bob

You can also build and run the latest development version with:

cargo run

✨ JavaScript (wip)

Installation:

npm i limbo-wasm

Example usage:

import { Database } from 'limbo-wasm';

const db = new Database('sqlite.db');
const stmt = db.prepare('SELECT * FROM users');
const users = stmt.all();
console.log(users);

🐍 Python (wip)

pip install pylimbo

Example usage:

import limbo

con = limbo.connect("sqlite.db")
cur = con.cursor()
res = cur.execute("SELECT * FROM users")
print(res.fetchone())

Contributing

We'd love to have you contribute to Limbo! Please check out the contribution guide to get started.

FAQ

How is Limbo different from libSQL?

Limbo is a research project to build a SQLite compatible in-process database in Rust with native async support. The libSQL project, on the other hand, is an open source, open contribution fork of SQLite, with focus on production features such as replication, backups, encryption, and so on. There is no hard dependency between the two projects. Of course, if Limbo becomes widely successful, we might consider merging with libSQL, but that is something that will be decided in the future.

Publications

• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, Jon Crowcroft Ashwin Rao (2024). Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O. In EdgeSys ‘24. [PDF]
• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, and Ashwin Rao (2023). Towards Database and Serverless Runtime Co-Design. In CoNEXT-SW ’23. [PDF] [Slides]

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Limbo by you, shall be licensed as MIT, without any additional terms or conditions.