electric VS wa-sqlite

I'm interested in this problem also!

I think there is a large overlap with projects that market/focus on offline-first experiences.

AFAIK this problem can be solved by:

1) Considering a client-side copy of the database that gets synced with the remote DB. This is an approach [PowerSync](https://www.powersync.com/) and [ElectricSql](https://electric-sql.com/) and [rxdb](https://rxdb.info/) take!

Yeah I agree with it being an exaggeration. They are certainly riding the admittedly dated perception that realtime is so hard it's only available to the Googles and Figmas. But there's now some amazing open source solutions available like Y.js and ElectricSQL[1]. The barrier has certainly come down.

[1] https://github.com/electric-sql/electric

https://github.com/electric-sql/electric :

> ElectricSQL is a local-first software platform that makes it easy to develop high-quality, modern apps with instant reactivity, realtime multi-user collaboration and conflict-free offline support.

> Local-first is a new development paradigm where your app code talks directly to an embedded local database and data syncs in the background via active-active database replication. Because the app code talks directly to a local database, apps feel instant. Because data syncs in the background via active-active replication it naturally supports multi-user collaboration and conflict-free offline

"SQLedge: Replicate Postgres to SQLite on the Edge" (2023)

Yup, this is correct.

We have had some requests / discussions around adding hooks to the sync service that will support custom logic on the write path (as per https://github.com/electric-sql/electric/discussions/565). This seems like a good idea but they don't exist yet.

The word on the street is that https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite is nearly production ready, closing in on the neat 1.0.0 release, with its IDBBatchAtomic engine highly recommended at https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web. You can try out the benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html.

And the other contestant is Dexie, stable https://dexie.org/.

If you were to branch into a new venture today, which one would you pick? And why?

It seems indeed very nice, the examples are clear and everything works from async. I tried with Deno, and now experimenting with my own VFS.

It does seem to suffer from maintainer problems too though, and I don't blame Roy Hashimoto for that. I wouldn't want to maintain such an obvious wrapper when it should be a task for SQLite's team to upstream the changes.

Roy Hashimoto doesn't want to maintain it as an NPM package for instance, as it is just an experiment: https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/12

"Low traffic is a happy place - I don't have any motivation to mess with that."

This is the WASM blob and it's 1.1 MB uncompressed. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/blob/master/dist/wa-.... No issues - it's cached by cloudflare.

We're using IndexedDB. Here's a writeup on alternatives https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/85 and a benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html

I have a genuine appreciation for how Linear has built this. We have had to build something similar for our note taking application (Reflect). It is very tricky to do and I wish there was more research on this.

In my opinion, what we need is:

1) A client-side performant SQLite database that supports live queries. I.e. you can automatically re-render the page when the queries change. That way your database can drive the UI and be the source of truth in regards to what's displayed on the screen.

2) A separate realtime syncing protocol that syncs database state to client state.

And ideally this is all open source, and that these two endeavors are not coupled tightly.

[1] Wa-sqlite is the best (imo) client-side db - better than than the official Sqlite WASM build (for now) because it had a indexeddb fallback for browsers that aren't the cutting edge Chrome.

[2] cr-sqlite is an interesting project using CRDTs to sync state around. However I still believe that for many production use-cases you want a ultimate server source of truth.

[3] Replicache is still the best closed source solution I know of.

[1] - https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite

[2] https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/discussions/63