litestack VS cr-sqlite

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

I'm a happy user of https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite/

If you're interested in this, here are some related projects that all take slightly different approaches:

- LiteSync directly competes with Marmot and supports DDL sync, but is closed source commercial (similar to SQLite EE): https://litesync.io

- dqlite is Canonical's distributed SQLite that depends on c-raft and kernel-level async I/O: https://dqlite.io

- cr-sqlite is a Rust-based loadable extension that adds CRDT changeset generation and reconciliation to SQLite: https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite

Slightly related but not really (no multi writer, no C-level SQLite API or other restrictions):

- comdb2 (Bloombergs multi-homed RDMS using SQLite as the frontend)

- rqlite: RDMS with HTTP API and SQLite as the storage engine, used for replication and strong consistency (does not scale writes)

- litestream/LiteFS: disaster recovery replication

- liteserver: active read-only replication (predecessor of LiteSync)

Theory is great, but how can we apply this in practice? Instead of starting from 0, and writing a CRDT, let's try and leverage an existing project to do the heavy lifting. My choice is crSQLITE, an extension for SQLite to support CRDT merging of databases. Under the hood, the extension creates tables to track changes and allow inserting into an event log for merging states of separated peers.

Also https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite/ which is SQLite + CRDTs

Runs/syncs to the browser too which is just lovely.

If you need multiple writers and can handle eventual correctness, you should really be using cr-sqlite[1]. It'll allow you to have any number of workers/clients that can write locally within the same process (so no network overhead) but still guarantee converge to the same state.

[1] https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite

I am fully on the offline-first bandwagon after starting to use cr-sqlite (https://vlcn.io), which works similar to ElectricSQL.

I thought the bundle size of wasm-sqlite would be prohibitive, but it's surprisingly quick to download and boot. Reducing network reliance solves so many problems and corner-cases in my web app. Having access to local data makes everything very snappy too - the user experience is much better. Even if the user's offline data is wiped by the browser (offline storage limits are a bit of a minefield), it is straightforward to get all synced changes back from the server.

I didn't know that. Especially the first approach sounds interesting to me, because as far as I know the transactions of Yjs seem to be a problem on heavily changing documents. https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite#approach-1-history-free... Thanks!

I wonder how this compares to https://vlcn.io?

The short ask: Anyone know of any projects that bring incremental view maintenance to SQLite?

The why:

Applications are usually read heavy. It is a sad state of affairs that, for these kinds of apps, we don't put more work on the write path to allow reads to benefit.

Would the whole No-SQL movement ever even have been a thing if relational databases had great support for materialized views that updated incrementally? I'd like to think not.

And more context:

I'm working to push the state of "functional relational programming" [1], [2] further forward. Materialized views with incremental updates are key to this. Bringing them to SQLite so they can be leveraged one the frontend would solve this whole quagmire of "state management libraries." I've been solving the data-sync problem in SQLite (https://vlcn.io/) and this piece is one of the next logical steps.

If nobody knows of an existing solution, would love to collaborate with someone on creating it.

[1] - https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/main/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf