libsql VS roapi

> 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!

If your use case is read-only I suggest taking a look at roapi[1]. It supports multiple read frontends (GraphQL, SQL, REST) and many backends like SQLite, JSON, google sheets, MySQL, etc.

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

For smaller datasets then anywhere up to a few mb which isn't so bad reasonable with an API but in theory for historic data it could be up to several gb. I've not seen datasette go that high (IIRC it's a 1000 row return limit by default).

That's what got me intrigued with Atlassians offering, as data lakes tend to be something internal to a company, not something I've ever seen offered as an interaction point to users.

I've also tested out roapi [1] which is nice if the data is in some structured format already (Parquet/JSON)

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

https://github.com/roapi/roapi/issues/103?

Very cool and well executed project. Love the sprinkle of Rust in all the other companion projects as well :)

The ROAPI(https://github.com/roapi/roapi) project I built also happened to support a similar feature set, i.e. to expose sqlite through a variety of remote query interfaces including pg wire protocols, rest apis and graphqls.

> why not just accept SQL and cut out all the unnecessary mapping?

You might be interested in what we're building: Seafowl, a database designed for running analytical SQL queries straight from the user's browser, with HTTP CDN-friendly caching [0]. It's a second iteration of the Splitgraph DDN [1] which we built on top of PostgreSQL (Seafowl is much faster for this use case, since it's based on Apache DataFusion + Parquet).

The tradeoff for allowing the client to run any SQL vs a limited API is that PostgREST-style queries have a fairly predictable and low overhead, but aren't as powerful as fully-fledged SQL with aggregations, joins, window functions and CTEs, which have their uses in interactive dashboards to reduce the amount of data that has to be processed on the client.

There's also ROAPI [2] which is a read-only SQL API that you can deploy in front of a database / other data source (though in case of using databases as a data source, it's only for tables that fit in memory).

[0] https://seafowl.io/

[1] https://www.splitgraph.com/connect

[2] https://github.com/roapi/roapi

It could be the NDJSON parser (DF source: [0]) or could be a variety of other factors. Looking at the ROAPI release archive [1], it doesn't ship with the definitive `columnq` binary from your comment, so it could also have something to do with compilation-time flags.

FWIW, we use the Parquet format with DataFusion and get very good speeds similar to DuckDB [2], e.g. 1.5s to run a more complex aggregation query `SELECT date_trunc('month', tpep_pickup_datetime) AS month, COUNT(*) AS total_trips, SUM(total_amount) FROM tripdata GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1 ASC)` on a 55M row subset of NY Taxi trip data.

[0]: https://github.com/apache/arrow-datafusion/blob/master/dataf...

[1]: https://github.com/roapi/roapi/releases/tag/roapi-v0.8.0

[2]: https://observablehq.com/@seafowl/benchmarks