Hi Diggsey, great question. We are currently focussed on functionality and stability, and then will draw our attention to performance. Coming this week we have a RocksDB storage implementation. We've only just launched our initial beta version, and we know there is a lot of improvement and work to be done (some of these performance issues we know about already and are on our Github issues list).

With regards to the consistency/isolation model, SurrealDB sits on top of a number of key-value stores. By using the distributed highly-available TiKV storage backend, https://tikv.org, (and we have a FoundationDB integration in the works), the database is designed to be highly-scalable and highly-available. The same guarantees (albeit just single-node, so no high-availability or scalability) will be available with the RocksDB implementation coming this week. By sitting on top of these key-value stores, SurrealDB ensures that all transactions are ACID compliant. We don't want to go for speed (for instance by writing to /dev/null) over anything, but want SurrealDB to be a reliable and performant backend for any application. Obviously we have a way to go to catch up with PostgreSQL (launched in 1996), but we will strive to get there!