Proud to see my name (https://twitter.com/YingjunWu) mentioned in Andy's blog. I was Andy's visiting PhD at CMU and was the top 1 contributor to Peloton (https://github.com/cmu-db/peloton).

Today, building a database from scratch is extremely difficult, for several reasons: 1. it anyways takes a long time; 2. there are so many successful (open-source) databases; 3. hiring top engineers are so expensive. 4. you won't get enough attention unless your system is drastically better than existing ones.

An interesting observation is that very few database was built since 2020 - almost all the newly built databases were developed on top of existing databases (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, etc).

I started building RisingWave (https://github.com/risingwavelabs/risingwave) in early 2021. The only reason we built the system from scratch was that none of the existing systems can address the problem we are solving - distributed SQL stream processing at cloud scale. We tried Flink but gave up, as it's too heavy and it's architecture was not designed for the cloud environment.

If you want to build a database from scratch, or are simply interested in databases, we may talk.