# Rewriting Airtable's Database in Rust Transitioning to Rust for high performance and scalability - **Source:** [Airtable Engineering](https://medium.com/airtable-eng) - **Published:** 2026-03-06 - **Topic:** [Software & Engineering](https://brifing.si/c/engineering) - **Original article:** - **On Brifing:** https://brifing.si/s/c3439bfb-39fc-4486-b056-bdce401e161a ## Airtable's Mission Airtable aims to democratize software creation, making it accessible to everyone. Initially designed for small teams, the product is now used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies. ## The AI Impact In the AI era, Airtable has become a platform where humans and AI agents collaborate on complex projects. AI agents can read and write data much faster than humans. ## Transition from TypeScript to Rust Airtable's proprietary in-memory database was moved from TypeScript to Rust for high-performance data processing. Rust offers memory safety and developer productivity. ## Technical Challenges JavaScript's limited multi-threading capabilities and memory management posed scalability challenges. Rust was the ideal choice to address these issues. ## New Database Architecture The new database uses multiple Node.js worker threads to enable parallel request processing. Data is stored in a Node.js native extension written in Rust. ## Customized Features Airtable's database offers unique features like real-time updates, efficient batch update operations, and transactional schema migrations. ## Scalability for the Future The transition to Rust will help Airtable adapt to the Enterprise AI era and solve its most challenging performance issues. ## Sources covering this story - https://medium.com/airtable-eng/rewriting-our-database-in-rust-f64e37a482ef?source=rss----103630b30187---4 — --- _Summary written by Brifing from the original reporting. Copyright in the original article belongs to its publisher; read the full piece at the link above._