Curious - would Rust be more appropriate than Go for such a task?

Golang works too. There is a few databases written in Golang, such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, CockroachDB, or tidb.

https://github.com/topics/database?l=go&o=desc&s=stars

Note that neither CockroachDB or TiDB use Golang for their actual storage engine, which is in both cases written in C (RocksDB). They do use Golang for SQL parsing though, which is what this post was mostly about.

VictoriaMetrics [1] is written entirely in Go. By default it uses canonical zstd library for compression (the library is written in C), but it supports pure Go mode when built with `make victoria-metrics-pure`. In this mode it uses zstd implementation written in Go [2].

[1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics

[2] https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/zstd#zstd