libsql VS litestream

> PS: I've got nothing against Turso, or libSQL. In fact I spent the last year perusing their virtual WAL API. The problem is that I found no documentation, nor any useful open source implementations of it. If there any I'd be very interested. So, thus far, I also don't have anything that drives towards libSQL.

Hey, this is v and I am an engineer at Turso. We do have some documentation and an example implementation of Virtual WAL

docs: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/blob/ef44612/libsql-...

example: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/blob/ef44612/libsql-...

for an open source implementation, you may check how Bottomless works. Bottomless is another project which does back up like litestream and it internally implements a Virtual WAL.

Bottomless - https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/tree/main/bottomless

I am sure we can improve our docs, make it more discover-able and easy to find. I am open to feedback and suggestions!

Astro DB is powered by LibSQL, an open source fork of SQLite that was created by Turso. You can use Astro DB's drop-in database to build features like blogs, comment functionality, forums, feedback systems, and user authentication.

sqlite already had an active community fork started by Turso called libsql. They are fixing longstanding API gaps the upstream team isn’t interested in supporting. For example, they added a native write-ahead log API, so you can plug directly into the WAL for streaming replication. This is possible-ish with upstream sqlite + LiteFs but litefs has to implement a whole FUSE file system and can’t run on Mac for that reason.

It’s more risky to run libsql because new features mean new bugs, but it seems worth it to me.

Libsql: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql

A bit of a tangent but for those who’d like to use SQLite for a backend, running it as a separate daemon could be an interesting choice, which would also remove there need of Cgo for the build and maybe make things like separate background job processes easier to accomplish. See [1], [2].

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1: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/tree/main/libsql-ser...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602175

https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

To summarize, instead of using one of the OSS licenses, the copyright holders simply declare the source to be in the public domain. In order to preserve that status they don't accept patches unless you submit some signed document that you agree with that.

To make things more complicated, they also use their a relatively niche version management system instead of git. Which would complicate making contributions (if they accepted them).

There's a popular fork that fixes all of these issues: https://github.com/libsql/libsql It is MIT licensed, on Github, and open for contributions.

Kind of a weird legal situation for a popular project like this that so many people depend on to have. Not judging; but it is odd. Seems like a lot of wasted efforts between users, would be contributors, and the people that forked this thing to address all that.

You could try making feature requests for https://github.com/libsql/libsql , which is a community fork of SQLite that aims to speed-up the development of long-wanted features.

For a comprehensive view, check out the issues list for libSQL core and sqld. But mostly, I want libSQL to be a home for all builders who believe there is room to take a lean, mean, and SQLite-compatible embedded database to new heights. I’d love to see your contribution!

I have not, but I keep meaning to collate everything I've learned into a set of useful defaults just to remind myself what settings I should be enabling and why.

Regarding Litestream, I learned pretty much all I know from their documentation: https://litestream.io/

This presentation is focused on the use-case of vertically scaling a single server and driving everything through that app server, which is running SQLite embedded within your application process.

This is the sweet-spot for SQLite applications, but there have been explorations and advances to running SQLite across a network of app servers. LiteFS (https://fly.io/docs/litefs/), the sibling to Litestream for backups (https://litestream.io), is aimed at precisely this use-case. Similarly, Turso (https://turso.tech) is a new-ish managed database company for running SQLite in a more traditional client-server distribution.

This post intends to help you setup replication for SQLite using Litestream.

I've been messing around with litestream. It is so cool. And, I either found a bug in the -timestamp switch or don't understand it correctly.

What I want to do is time travel into my sqlite database. I'm trying to do some forensics on why my web service returned the wrong data during a production event. Unfortunately, after the event, someone deleted records from the database and I'm unsure what the data looked like and am having trouble recreating the production issue.

Litestream has this great switch: -timestamp. If you use it (AFAICT) you can time travel into your database and go back to the database state at that moment. However, it does not seem to work as I expect it to:

https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/564

I have the entirety of the sqlite database from the production event as well. Is there a way I could cycle through the WAL files and restore the database to the point in time before the records I need were deleted?

Will someone take sqlite and compile it into the browser using WASM so I can drag a sqlite database and WAL files into it and then using a timeline slider see all the states of the database over time? :)

We're using SQLite in production very heavily with millions of databases and fairly high operations throughput.

But we did run into some scariness around trying to use Litestream that put me off it for the time being. Litestream is really cool but it is also very much a cool hack and the risk of database corruption issues feels very real.

The scariness I ran into was related to this issue https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/510

Litestream is a library that allows you to easily create backups. You can probably just do analytic queries on the backup data and reduce load on your server.

https://litestream.io/

One possible strategy is to have one directory/file per customer which is one SQLite file. But then as the user logs in, you have to look up first what database they should be connected to.

OR somehow derive it from the user ID/username. Keeping all the customer databases in a single directory/disk and then constantly "lite streaming" to S3.

Because each user is isolated, they'll be writing to their own database. But migrations would be a pain. They will have to be rolled out to each database separately.

One upside is, you can give users the ability to take their data with them, any time. It is just a single file.

[0]. https://litestream.io/

Upstream Kuma uses a local SQLite database to store account data, configuration for services to monitor, notification settings, and more. To make sure that our data is available across redeploys, we will bundle Uptime Kuma with Litestream, a project that implements streaming replication for SQLite databases to a remote object storage provider. Effectively, this allows us to treat the local SQLite database as if it were securely stored in a remote database.