SurrealDB Sacrifices Data Durability

SurrealDB is sacrificing data durability to make benchmarks look better 🚨 TL;DR: If you are a SurrealDB user running any SurrealDB instance backed by the RocksDB or SurrealKV storage backends you MUST EXPLICITLY set SURREAL_SYNC_DATA=true in your environment variables otherwise your instance is NOT crash safe and can very easily corrupt. If you're familiar with Rust or follow what new hype databases are gaining a following, you might have heard of SurrealDB, a jack-of-all-trades database that does it all... So they say.

A screenshot of an article criticizing SurrealDB, a Rust-based database, for sacrificing data durability in order to achieve better benchmark results. The warning says users of RocksDB or SurrealKV-backed instances must explicitly set SURREAL_SYNC_DATA=true or risk corruption after a crash. It is shared as a sarcastic reaction to hype-driven software benchmarks and the tradeoff between performance and reliability.

• @gentoomemes / 18380 2025-08-25