Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync) • Hacker News Board

Re: Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)

#31

Post by jarym » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

HackerThemAll wrote: post #30

SQLite benchmarks are deeply flawed. Somebody has proven that it can sustain 4M queries per second on bare metal, 1.5M qps on a cloud VM, and it happened over 7 years ago. Therefore I do not believe any number from SurrealDB. https://use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a...

I concur. I had Claude try it out on a project I'm working on:

  Headline so far (nested, 10k, p50/p95/p99 µs):

  ┌─────────────────────┬─────────────┬────────────────┐
  │         op          │   SQLite    │   SurrealKV    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ getattr             │ 1.1/1.4/1.5 │ 65/92/120      │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ lookup              │ 1.4/1.5/1.8 │ 73/102/138     │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ readdir_page        │ 45/51/59    │ 1458/1678/1843 │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ create_child        │ 34/55/74    │ 190/272/339    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ record_write        │ 8/14/19     │ 124/157/183    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ apply_remote_object │ 9/12/17     │ 137/172/206    │
  └─────────────────────┴─────────────┴────────────────┘

  SQLite is ~15–60× faster on every op — and SurrealKV's reads are properly indexed, so this isn't a setup artifact.

Re: Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)

#32

Post by redbluered » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

itsezc wrote: post #28

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #27

Note to others, since it wasn't obvious to me at first: their database is proprietary. Regarding the benchmarks themselves, they would've been more interesting with reproducible steps and more hardware variety.

All of our releases thus far are source available, and will be open source 4 years from the release date. To your point on the benchmarks, this is something we can improve on documenting and will do so for our next release.

[dead]

Re: Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)

#33

Post by redbluered » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

redwood wrote: post #11

llimllib wrote: post #10

the surreal docs should not say "surreal is open source", it's source-available under the BSL

I'd love to see the OSI mature it's license taxonomy for 2026

[dead]

Re: Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)

#34

Post by declanrice » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

HackerThemAll wrote: post #30

SQLite benchmarks are deeply flawed. Somebody has proven that it can sustain 4M queries per second on bare metal, 1.5M qps on a cloud VM, and it happened over 7 years ago. Therefore I do not believe any number from SurrealDB. https://use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a...

The repo is open source, so why not raise a PR to https://github.com/surrealdb/crud-bench and point out any misconfigurations you find? It's good that they've made it open source, so can easily point out if there are any misconfiguration.

Re: Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)

#35

Post by limagnolia » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

nkmnz wrote: post #25

limagnolia wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the OSI should be concerned with European companies and their business models? Why would European companies have a more difficult time building software centric open source businesses than companies in other countries?

Why should European companies (or anyone else) be concerned with definitions made up by OSI?

Because the OSI is responsible for the creation of the term as a concept (Yes, I know you might be able to find one or two instances of some one saying "open source" in the context of software before the OSI came along, but the vast majority of usage and the ideas behind it came about because of the OSI).

More importantly than that- because the OSI definition is a darn good one and the BSL is a garbage license that restricts essential freedoms. The OSI definition ensures a standard set of minimum freedoms exist. Namely, the BSL makes it difficult for a fork to exist, brings additional restrictions that could need additional legal review, and prevents users from seeking alternative suppliers, locking them into an ecosystem that may not or may cease to meet their needs.