litestream VS sqlcipher

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.

SQLite, while versatile and easy to use, does not include built-in support for encryption, leaving the data at rest potentially vulnerable. To address this, external tools such as the SQLite Encryption Extension (SEE) or open-source projects like SQLCipher can be employed to encrypt the database file. This process can be achieved through the following steps:

I am personally using SQLite for a project that has been ordered by some future clients and it would perfectly suit your case. I strongly recommend it. Moreover, you can encrypt your entire db is you use this.

> Cloud sync (encrypted!) is important because your average user needs that convenience and durability of authenticator

Local-only iOS Codebook [1] sync (open-source encrypted! by SQLCipher [2]) provides convenience, durability, transparency, decentralization and fewer supply chain dependencies.

[1] https://www.zetetic.net/codebook

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

One option that I have been considering is creating a simple, encrypted SQL database (like SQLite & SQLcipher combo), that could be used to store & retrieve crypto secrets required in the release build pipeline. To manipulate this database, one needs to provide a password. This solution could be implemented as a microservice running on the build server, for example, in a dedicated docker container. To trigger a new release build, the user with the correct credentials could access the build server over our local network, and, if in a possession of the correct password required to decrypt the crypto database, trigger a release build.

That's not true. There are wonderful open source projects ensuring that layer. https://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher for example.

No, SQLCipher takes another approach. They modify the source of SQLite's pager with numerous code blocks in order to "hook in" the encryption code. Compare this SQLCipher code to the original SQLite code.

Your options are use SQLCipher to transparently encrypt the entire DB file on the device, or your have your app handle the encryption/decryption of each record during each read/write operation. If AES-256 isn't a hard requirement, encrypting at the record level is way easier with libsodium secretbox