donutdb VS litestack

Man this is cool. While I really enjoy my own solution of using a custom SQLite vfs that stores your db transparently in dynamodb[0], this really is a compelling alternative.

I wonder how viable this would be to use from aws lambda? It seems like the way lambda does concurrency probably doesn't play all that well with litefs. Maybe it's time to move some workloads over to fly.io.

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb

There's a bunch of projects that have implemented this. I wrote a SQLite VFS in Go that lets you query a read-only SQLite db over http (including from s3) [0].

The VFS API offers the possibility for weirder storage solutions, if thats the type of thing you're into. Recently I've been moving some of my personal websites hosted on AWS Lambda over to use a read/write sqlite db backed by DynamoDB[1]. There are a bunch of limitations to this type of thing (like it uses a global write lock), but it works nicely for DBs that have low write frequency.

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp

[1]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb

The benchmarks for LiteCache are impressive, with a small caveat. While LiteCache outperforms a local Redis installation for every read operation, it seems like there's still room for improvement, especially for large write payloads.

Luckily, the official LiteStack benchmarks include measurements for LiteCable against Redis, which I am going to quote here.

Let's quickly look into how LiteJob uses SQLite to implement a job queueing system. In essence, the class Litequeue interfaces with the SQLite queue table. This table's columns, like id, name, fire_at, value, and created_at, store and manage job details.

Next, we install LiteStack using the shipped generator:

Related: I wrote a piece last week on deploying Rails apps to production on Fly.io at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/sqlite-and-rails-in-production/

The work that’s made this possible is:

1. Litestack - https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack

2. Fly.io’s work on the dockerfile-rails generator detecting Sqlite and Litestack in a Rails project, then setting up sane defaults for where that data is stored and persisted in production. This is all done behind the scenes with no intervention required from the person deploying.

3. Servers are overall faster and more powerful

I hope more Rails hosts make it easier and safer to deploy Sqlite to production. It will lower costs and reduce complexity for folks deploying apps.

Didn't know that one! The litestack.gemspec shows it's a wrapper around the sqlite3 gem. So, not really comparable...

I’m working on this for Rails apps at https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack/pull/12

The idea is that people with small-to-medium size Rails Turbo apps should be able to deploy them without needing Redis or Postgres.

I’ve gotten as far as deploying this stack _without_ LiteFS and it works great. The only downside is the application queues requests on deploy, but for some smaller apps it’s acceptable to have the client wait for a few seconds while the app restarts.

When I get that PR merged I’ll write about how it works on Fly and publish it to https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/.

Rails is the way to go. The productivity of the Ruby language is insane. It's battle tested for decades and you can easily scale your prototype.

If you want a simple app served on a single host you can try LiteStack [0] so you don't need a Redis/Postgres/Sidekiq instance, just SQLite.

Laravel is also good if you like PHP language.

[0] https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack