cloudbeaver VS postlite

Hi, author of litexplore here!

I agree remote management is the "least convenient" aspect of SQLite. If you have control over the remote VM where the DB is hosted, you can also run something like ClouDBeaver[0], Datasette[1] or sqlite-web[2] as a Docker container, then connect to it from your laptop.

The reason I wrote litexplore was that those approaches require exposing extra ports, managing authentication, etc. With litexplore, you just need the sqlite3 CLI (compiled with the JSON1 extension) installed in the VM and a way to access it over SSH.

litexplore is still in early stages and I have some updates planned in the following 2 months, but the basics are working.

[0]: https://github.com/dbeaver/cloudbeaver

CloudBeaver

CloudBeaver's integrated schema diagrams\ Released around the same time as Beekeeper Studio, CloudBeaver is a smaller, open-source project supported by a stable of thirteen contributors. Because of this, development schedules are a little more deliberate, but that hasn't stopped CloudBeaver from fine-tuning its lightweight, user-friendly GUI. The interface is clean and has both dark and light modes. CloudBeaver also presents users with informative visualizations, keeping you engaged and organized as databases scale. Being a web application, this tool is accessible to a larger subset of users without consuming too many resources or disk space.

Yes, this is from the same group https://github.com/dbeaver/cloudbeaver

Now, if only they would stop trying to be cute and give their releases actual version names instead of castor and pollux. There's also a version 20.0.6, but the latest release on GitHub is 1.2.0, but the changelog in the README says 20.0.6 is the latest.

#. SQLite WAL mode

From https://www.sqlite.org/isolation.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32247085 :

> [sqlite] WAL mode permits simultaneous readers and writers. It can do this because changes do not overwrite the original database file, but rather go into the separate write-ahead log file. That means that readers can continue to read the old, original, unaltered content from the original database file at the same time that the writer is appending to the write-ahead log

#. superfly/litefs: aFUSE-based file system for replicating SQLite https://github.com/superfly/litefs

#. sqldiff: https://www.sqlite.org/sqldiff.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265005

#. dolthub/dolt: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

> Dolt can be set up as a replica of your existing MySQL or MariaDB database using standard MySQL binlog replication. Every write becomes a Dolt commit. This is a great way to get the version control benefits of Dolt and keep an existing MySQL or MariaDB database.

#. pganalyze/libpg_query: https://github.com/pganalyze/libpg_query :

> C library for accessing the PostgreSQL parser outside of the server environment

#. Ibis + Substrait [ + DuckDB ]

> ibis strives to provide a consistent interface for interacting with a multitude of different analytical execution engines, most of which (but not all) speak some dialect of SQL.

> Today, Ibis accomplishes this with a lot of help from `sqlalchemy` and `sqlglot` to handle differences in dialect, or we interact directly with available Python bindings (for instance with the pandas, datafusion, and polars backends).

> [...] `Substrait` is a new cross-language serialization format for communicating (among other things) query plans. It's still in its early days, but there is already nascent support for Substrait in Apache Arrow, DuckDB, and Velox.

#. benbjohnson/postlite: https://github.com/benbjohnson/postlite

> postlite is a network proxy to allow access to remote SQLite databases over the Postgres wire protocol. This allows GUI tools to be used on remote SQLite databases which can make administration easier.

> The proxy works by translating Postgres frontend wire messages into SQLite transactions and converting results back into Postgres response wire messages. Many Postgres clients also inspect the pg_catalog to determine system information so Postlite mirrors this catalog by using an attached in-memory database with virtual tables. The proxy also performs minor rewriting on these system queries to convert them to usable SQLite syntax.

> Note: This software is in alpha. Please report bugs. Postlite doesn't alter your database unless you issue INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE commands so it's probably safe. If anything, the Postlite process may die but it shouldn't affect your database.

#. > "Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages" (2021) re: sql.js-httpvfs, DuckDB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28021766

#. awesome-db-tools https://github.com/mgramin/awesome-db-tools

Ben Johnson poked around in this space last year too https://github.com/benbjohnson/postlite

Note that this already exists on top of SQLite proper - authored by Ben Johnson (Litestream, Fly.io etc.) - https://github.com/benbjohnson/postlite

Currently, you need to SSH in and use the sqlite3 CLI on the server. There has been some work in this area but it's all still rough around the edges. I wrote a server called Postlite[1] that exposes remote SQLite databases over the Postgres wire protocol but it's very alpha. :)

I'd love to see more work in this area. Ricardo Ander-Egg wrote a remote management tool called litexplore[2] that connects over SSH to the SQLite CLI behind the scenes. I haven't used it but I think there's a lot of potential with that approach.

[1]: https://github.com/benbjohnson/postlite

[2]: https://github.com/litements/litexplore

I've not use this myself, but Ben Johnson's https://github.com/benbjohnson/postlite in front of SQlite might allow you to use PostgREST? I recall him saying on a podcast that his goal was to be able to point the large ecosystem of PG tools at SQlite.