Rewriting SQLite from prison with Preston Thorpe

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:   / pthorpe92   Preston's Blog: https://pthorpe92.dev GitHub: https://github.com/PThorpe92 Turso: https://turso.tech Follow Aaron: Twitter/X:   / aarondfrancis   Database School: https://databaseschool.com Database School YouTube Channel:    / @thedatabaseschool   (Subscribe today) LinkedIn:   / aarondfrancis   Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. 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