Eskildsen: Modern hardware requires databases designed around concurrent requests, not sequential roundtrips
Simon Eskildsen · Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer · Mar 12, 2026 · at 13:35
Turbopuffer founder Simon Eskildsen breaks down the architectural requirements for high-performance databases using modern NVMe and S3 primitives.
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“You really have to build a database where you have as few round trips as possible, right? This is how CPUs work today. It's how NVMe SSDs work. It's how S three works that you want to have a very large amount of outstanding requests, right? Like basically go to S three, do like that thousand requests to ask for data in one round trip, wait for that, get that, like make a new decision, do it again, and try to do that maybe a maximum of three times. No databases were designed that way.”
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