Serverless

Turso is a distributed SQLite service built on libSQL , an MIT-licensed fork of SQLite. It adds embedded replicas: local SQLite files that sync from a primary database in the cloud. Reads happen at local-disk speed, under 200 nanoseconds in benchmarks. Writes go to one primary region. You get sub-millisecond reads and read-your-writes consistency for less than a managed Postgres bill. You install the client SDK, point it at a Turso URL and a local file path, and your app reads from a replica that stays in sync on its own.

Drizzle ORM is the better pick for edge and serverless work in 2026. It ships a 7.4 kB gzipped runtime with zero binary dependencies. Prisma is the stronger choice for teams that want a higher-level query API, a polished data browser, and a growing cloud platform. The right answer turns on where your code runs and how your team thinks about SQL.

That one-paragraph summary covers the call for most people. The reasoning behind it is the rest of this post. The two tools follow different beliefs about how TypeScript apps should talk to databases. Those differences show up in every part of the workflow, from writing queries to shipping on Cloudflare Workers.

Hono is a ~14KB TypeScript web framework that runs on every modern JavaScript runtime with the same API. Write your routes once and ship to Bun , Deno , Cloudflare Workers , Node.js , AWS Lambda , Vercel Edge, Fastly Compute, or Netlify. No code changes needed. Hono builds on Web Standard APIs (Request, Response, fetch), which makes it small, fast, and far lighter than Express . It ships with middleware, validation, RPC, and streaming. The current stable release is v4.12.

SQLite can now run at the edge. It works inside Cloudflare Workers via D1, on Fly.io via LiteFS replicated volumes, and in any V8 isolate through embedded WASM builds. This gives you sub-millisecond read queries. You get them by placing your database close to your users on a global CDN. A few tools made this practical: LiteFS for transparent SQLite replication, Cloudflare D1 as a managed edge service, Turso for libSQL with server mode and replication, and Litestream for streaming the WAL to S3. SQLite ships as a single file with zero dependencies. So you get a relational database that deploys with your app binary, needs no connection pooling, and handles thousands of reads per second per node.