Show HN: AnuDB– Backed on RocksDB, 279x Faster Than SQLite in Parallel Workloads

22 points

a year ago

We recently benchmarked AnuDB, a lightweight embedded database built on top of RocksDB, against SQLite on a Raspberry Pi. The performance difference, especially for parallel operations, was dramatic.

GitHub Links:

AnuDBBenchmark: https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDBBenchmark

AnuDB (Core): https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDB

Why Compare AnuDB and SQLite? SQLite is excellent for many embedded use cases — it’s simple, battle-tested, and extremely reliable. But it doesn't scale well when parallelism or concurrent writes are required.

AnuDB, built over RocksDB, offers better concurrency out of the box. We wanted to measure the practical differences using real benchmarks on a Raspberry Pi.

Benchmark Setup Platform: Raspberry Pi 2 (ARMv7)

Benchmarked operations: Insert, Query, Update, Delete, Parallel

AnuDB uses RocksDB and MsgPack serialization

SQLite uses raw data, with WAL mode enabled for fairness

Key Results Insert:

AnuDB: 448 ops/sec

SQLite: 838 ops/sec

Query:

AnuDB: 54 ops/sec

SQLite: 30 ops/sec

Update:

AnuDB: 408 ops/sec

SQLite: 600 ops/sec

Delete:

AnuDB: 555 ops/sec

SQLite: 1942 ops/sec

Parallel (10 threads):

AnuDB: 412 ops/sec

SQLite: 1.4 ops/sec (!)

In the parallel case, AnuDB was over 279x faster than SQLite.

Why the Huge Parallel Difference? SQLite, even with WAL mode, uses global database-level locks. It’s not designed for high-concurrency scenarios.

RocksDB (used in AnuDB) supports:

Fine-grained locking

Concurrent readers/writers

Better parallelism using LSM-tree architecture

This explains why AnuDB significantly outperforms SQLite under threaded workloads.

Try It Yourself Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDBBenchmark cd AnuDBBenchmark ./build.sh /path/to/AnuDB /path/to/sqlite ./benchmark

Results are saved to benchmark_results.csv.

When to Use AnuDB Use AnuDB if:

You need embedded storage with high concurrency

You’re dealing with telemetry, sensor data, or parallel workloads

You want something lightweight and faster than SQLite under load

Stick with SQLite if:

You need SQL compatibility

You value mature ecosystem/tooling

Feedback Welcome This is an early experiment. We’re actively developing AnuDB and would love feedback:

Is our benchmark fair?

Where could we optimize further?

Would this be useful in your embedded project?

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