Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0).
Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document.
Useful for:
- AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings
- Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks
- Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer
- Per-user databases: isolated, scales horizontally, runs at the edge
The idea of splitting data per entity isn't new: Cassandra and DynamoDB use partition keys to scale horizontally, but you're stuck with rigid schemas ("single-table design" [3]), limited queries, and painful migrations. SQLite per entity gives you the same scalability without those tradeoffs [2].
How this compares:
- Cloudflare Durable Objects & Agents: most similar to Rivet Actors with colocated SQLite and compute, but closed-source and vendor-locked
- Turso Cloud: Great platform, but closed-source + diff use case. Clients query over the network, so reads are slow or stale. Rivet's single-writer actor model keeps reads local and fresh.
- D1, Turso (the DB), Litestream, rqlite, LiteFS: great tools for running a single SQLite database with replication. Rivet is for running lots of isolated databases.
Under the hood, SQLite runs in-process with each actor. A custom VFS persists writes to HA storage (FoundationDB or Postgres).
Rivet Actors also provide realtime (WebSockets), React integration (useActor), horizontal scalability, and actors that sleep when idle.
GitHub: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet
Docs: https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/sqlite/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472519
[2] https://rivet.dev/blog/2025-02-16-sqlite-on-the-server-is-mi...
swaminarayan•1h ago
NathanFlurry•1h ago
However, we are planning on building a query engine that can operate over multiple databases. One option we're considering is exposing Rivet SQLite as a DuckDB datasource: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/data/data_sources