I Built an Event-Sourcing Database Engine: Meet Genesis Db

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

patriceckhart

45 points

40 comments

genesisdb.ioTechstory

heatedmixed

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Event SourcingDatabaseOpen Source

Key topics

Event Sourcing

Database

Open Source

The creator of Genesis DB, a new event-sourcing database engine, announces its production readiness, sparking a discussion about its originality, performance, and potential adoption.

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01Story posted
Sep 15, 2025 at 4:25 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 25, 2025 at 4:43 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (40 comments)

Showing 40 comments

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

2 replies

Hey!

I'm Patric, and I just hit a major milestone - Genesis DB 1.0.(1) is officially production-ready.

Why I built this: Existing event sourcing tools felt too heavy, opinionated, or expensive. I wanted something that matches how developers actually think about events - simple, transparent, and powerful.

What Genesis DB is:

- Event sourcing database engine written in Go

- HTTP + JSON interface (no proprietary protocols)

- CloudEvents native with zero vendor lock-in

- One-command backups/restores

- Built-in Prometheus metrics & structured logging

Major features that made it to 1.0:

- Smart validation - Preconditions act as gatekeepers, enforcing business logic before writes hit the database

- Schema registration - Automatic event validation for type safety and data consistency

- Native GDPR compliance - One-command user data deletion, full data portability, built-in audit trails

- Battle-tested performance - Thousands of events/second, zero data loss, stable under load

- ...

The journey:

- Started because I love event-driven architectures but hated the tooling complexity

- A few versions, each adding features

- Now processing real production workloads across multiple industries

Want to try it? - Free tier: 10,000 events for testing/small projects (I’m not here to be the biggest cost factor in any business. If you’ve got special requirements, let’s talk.)

- Self-host or use the managed platform (coming soon)

Full docs at https://docs.genesisdb.io

Thanks for reading!

capestart

4 months ago

2 replies

Congrats on hitting 1.0. love the focus on simplicity and real world dev workflows

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

Thanks a lot! That means a lot. Simplicity + real-world workflows is exactly what I wanted to nail.

goloroden

4 months ago

Just a little hint: Read the other comments as well…

NomDePlum

4 months ago

2 replies

Amazing, well done. Having used Go for something similar can understand why you chose that for this venture. Wondering if there was anything in particular worked out for you with that decision?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

I've been using Go for some time now. I've never programmed with Rust before, and it seemed appropriate to use Go for this project. In my initial prototypes of an event sourcing system that I experimented with last year, I used PHP (yes PHP) with either PostgreSQL or MySQL and a few other things. A major advantage of Go is its backward compatibility, which certainly makes maintenance easier.

goloroden

4 months ago

Just a little hint: Read the other comments as well…

dev_l1x_be

4 months ago

1 reply

Where can I see the architecture and the libraries used for this project?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

That's a valid question. At the very least, disclosing the libraries being used might even be mandatory. I'll check on that asap and add it to the documentation.

Rickasaurus

4 months ago

1 reply

Seems like very cool tech.

I think the adoption hurdle will be hard unless you have a free plan that can be used for small things indefinitely. Having a hard cap on events would make me pass on this for fun side projects, which is where I would pivot later from to work projects. Just throwing that out there. This is why my last work project was supabase, I was using their free tier for some fun personal stuff.

If you have another vector for adoption that's fine too.

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

I understand. Honestly, it was never my intention to get rich with this project. Covering a bit of the development time, servers, and so on would already be nice. Since Genesis DB doesn't limit the number of instances you can run, I would have happily used it myself as a developer at that price point. I've thought about a one-time payment model before. But as I said, I do understand your perspective.

jdc0589

4 months ago

1 reply

this looks very cool. Rigging together your own event sourced Db is doable, but it gets a little annoying over time to keep DIYing everything, doing snapshot optimizations, etc...

one note: searchability on your query language named GQL may not be great, given the whole graphql thing.

goloroden

4 months ago

Regarding GQL… which (accidentally :-D) has almost the exact same syntax as EventQL (the query language of EventSourcingDB), which was published earlier. See https://docs.eventsourcingdb.io/reference/eventql/ for details.

What a coincidence… ;-)

mandeepj

4 months ago

2 replies

Congratulations! I don’t think the db engine is open source. Any plans to do that?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

Not at the moment, but I'm considering a one-time payment option since people generally dislike subscriptions.

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

Not open source, but we're planning to open things up with Genesis DB CE - a free, fully usable community edition: https://www.genesisdb.io/blog/posts/2025-09-25/genesis-db-1-...

cpursley

4 months ago

4 replies

Why not just hook up postgres to something like https://github.com/cpursley/walex or any of the other libraries like Debezium, https://sequinstream.com? Isn't postgres enough?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

I've experimented quite a bit and I'm familiar with some of those concepts, in fact, I even looked at them early on in development. But my goal was to build more than just a wrapper around SQL.

koakuma-chan

4 months ago

I know right? This whole CQRS+ES thing feels like a scam.

Nelkins

4 months ago

There's also https://github.com/message-db/message-db

Admittedly, these options seem to not be quite as user friendly as OP's solution.

AndrewKemendo

4 months ago

+1 for debezium but that’s post deployment cdc as a stream API

We need more native streaming databases overall

inthebeginning

4 months ago

1 reply

tbh – this pretty much looks like they straight-up copied another database that dropped earlier this year. looks like GenesisDB grabbed all its ideas from here:

https://hub.docker.com/r/thenativeweb/eventsourcingdb

take a look and see for yourself… #copycat

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

I've definitely taken inspiration from some great ideas out there, but Genesis DB is built on my own design choices and implementation. The earlier concepts behaved quite similarly, with the main difference being that back then I hadn't implemented the CloudEvents standard or event hash-chaining yet. I later found both to be really valuable additions. The idea of event chaining isn't new for example, I just hadn't had it on my radar for very long.

goloroden

4 months ago

2 replies

Hi there,

I’m one of the creators of EventSourcingDB, and the CTO of the native web (the company behind EventSourcingDB).

Because of ongoing legal investigations I can’t comment any further, but I’d like to provide you with some links, so you can see for yourself:

https://www.eventsourcingdb.io

https://docs.eventsourcingdb.io

https://hub.docker.com/r/thenativeweb/eventsourcingdb

https://www.cqrs.com

https://www.eventsourcing.ai

15155

4 months ago

Absent substance, how is this not just self-promotion?

koakuma-chan

4 months ago

See what? What legal investigations? I don't get what you are trying to say.

AndrewKemendo

4 months ago

1 reply

One of the big issues I’ve always found with all streaming services is rehydration post migration or for HA or failover.

Has this group done testing for how long it takes for different sizes of streams to rehydrate?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

One approach is to keep track of the ID of the last consumed event and use that as the starting point for rehydration. That way, even after a migration or failover, the stream can resume efficiently without replaying the entire history.

vivzkestrel

4 months ago

1 reply

how does it differ from timescale db?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

TimescaleDB looks great and is built on top of Postgres. Genesis DB, in contrast, is a straightforward (if not simpler) event store that manages data differently than Postgres. That said, TimescaleDB is definitely worth a look.

unconed

4 months ago

1 reply

Event sourcing gives you all the technical overhead of replayable transactions while giving your end-users none of the benefits (e.g. undo/redo). It's purely an infrastructure-level feature that only makes auditors and sysadmins happier.

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

Event sourcing doesn't directly address this. However, the "undo" functionality is not a feature of event sourcing itself, but rather something your application needs to implement. Sure, you can implement that functionality without event sourcing, but it becomes problematic if you decide to add it later.

citizenpaul

4 months ago

1 reply

What does

"Logs like a Philosopher."

Mean? Did you mean sage? I dont want my logs to make me contemplate the meaning of life.

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

It's a playful metaphor. We meant that the logs are thorough, reflective, and give you insights. They help you understand your system and its processes. No worries, you won't end up contemplating the meaning of life, unless you really want to. :-)

citizenpaul

4 months ago

1 reply

I figured. It was playful criticism. I don't think it lands. Most potential customers when looking at 10 competing products are IMO more likely to see that and go umm IDK what that means for sure and put your product in "maybe" list, which is really just the no list.

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

I appreciate your remarks and the perspective, that's valuable feedback. I'll think about adjusting it to make the message clearer.

starrax

4 months ago

1 reply

I find GenesisDB difficult in several respects. On the one hand, there is its similarity to EventSourceDB and the fact that it is almost a 1:1 copy, for example in terms of the query language. On the other hand, the performance of GenesisDB is anything but acceptable, i noticed some query language bugs and the PHP and JavaScript SDKs are offered without testing. But now comes the critical point: it's a one-man show, without open source, which raises the question: why should as a person or as a company rely on GenesisDB for its project?

patriceckhartAuthor

4 months ago

Thank you for your comment! I think it's actually your very first one on Hacker News, or am I mistaken?

If you run into bugs and want to share them, please just open an issue in the GitRepo's, or send us a message, ... Genesis DB is already being used in production projects, and so far issues that came up have been addressed in newer builds, including performance.

On performance specifically, it would be really helpful to know more about your setup: machine, architecture, how much RAM, ... Performance issues mainly existed in the very early versions, some of which were still SQL wrappers.

On the "one-man show" point: The architecture of your software can allow you to swap out the underlying database system, meaning you're not dependent on anyone. Thanks to CloudEvents, your data remains compatible with other CloudEvents-supporting systems.

In the end, it's up to everyone to decide which software they want to use.

ImPleadThe5th

4 months ago

Nobody tell Greg Young!

spoudaia

4 months ago

Really? You built this bc “tools felt too heavy, opinionated, or expensive” — LOL… or just bc there was such a nice blueprint you could use for inspiration…?!

Here is the original:

https://www.eventsourcingdb.io

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ID: 45247381Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 12:32:34 PM

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