seafowl VS react-admin

In case you're interested in scale-to-zero database hosting, a few months ago I paired gcsfuse with Seafowl [0][1], an early stage open source database written in Rust. Was a lot of fun balancing tradeoffs that are usually not possible with classical databases e.g. Postgres. Thank you gcsfuse contributors.

[0] https://seafowl.io

> why someone would start something in a memory unsafe language these days

You might like what we (Splitgraph) are building with Seafowl [0], a new database which is written in Rust and based on Datafusion and delta-rs [1]. It's optimized for running at the edge and responding to queries via HTTP with cache-friendly semantics.

[0] https://seafowl.io

[1] https://www.splitgraph.com/blog/seafowl-delta-storage-layer

For example, here's the IPInfo dataset, and here's a some commodities data from Trase which is proxying to their live Postgres database, and powering their interactive dashboard. Also, here's the repository of Socrata metadata powering the newsfeed - we scrape it nightly and then push it to Seafowl, our new open-source database optimized for running cache-friendly queries "at the edge." The code for Open Data Monitor is on GitHub, if you're curious.

This is basically how we do authentication in the Splitgraph DDN [0], which is kind of like a multi-tenant serverless Postgres.

We implement the Postgres frontend with a forked version of PgBouncer, and we changed the authentication method such that when the user authenticates, we issue them a JWT which we store as a session variable. That session variable has the same security properties as a cookie in a web browser (the user can change/manipulate it, but if it's signed by us we can trust its claims).

That's the simple explanation that skips over the multi-tenant part. I don't want to derail from the thread - Neon is very cool, and we are actually experimenting with it right now, for storing the Seafowl [1] catalog when deploying to "scale to zero" services like Google Cloud Run or AWS Lambda, which don't have persistent storage.

[0] https://www.splitgraph.com/connect/query

[1] https://seafowl.io

This is really cool! I've always found IP data to be a compelling example of a data product, especially when talking about Splitgraph, a company of which I'm a co-founder (and btw - I also met my co-founder on HN!).

So, I exported the CSV files for country and asn data, and then uploaded them to Splitgraph. You can see some sample queries in the readme of the repository [0]. Since Splitgraph is built on Postgres, it's possible to use all the `inet` and `cidr` tools available from Postgres, so you can make range queries easily. One sample query also demonstrates a join between the two tables, resulting in the equivalent of your combined country_asn.csv.

Another idea: We have a newer project called Seafowl [1], which is an open-source analytical database optimized for running "at the edge," with cache-friendly semantics making it ideal for querying from Web applications. We don't have a self-hosted version of this yet, but perhaps the next thing to try would be loading this data into Seafowl and querying it "at the edge" - I've been thinking about ways that we could package Seafowl along as an OpenResty module, which could allow for true "at the edge" use cases like querying IP data in your reverse proxy. (Although the .mmdb format already solves this particular problem pretty efficiently and interoperably, although I'd be curious to measure the difference).

[0] https://www.splitgraph.com/miles/ipinfo-country-asn

[1] https://seafowl.io/

You can indeed run LiteFS by yourself, without Consul, as a sidecar / wrapper around your application. We do it in our project and have a Docker Compose example at [0]. In this case, you specify a specific known leader node. We haven't tried getting it running independently with Consul to do leader election / failover.

[0] https://github.com/splitgraph/seafowl/blob/main/examples/lit...

This is the vision of what we're building at Splitgraph. [0] You might be most interested in our recent project Seafowl [1] which is an open-source analytical database optimized for running "at the edge," with cache-friendly semantics making it ideal for querying from Web applications. It's built in Rust using DataFusion and incorporates many of the lessons we've learned building the Data Delivery Network [2] for Splitgraph.

[0] https://www.splitgraph.com

[1] https://seafowl.io

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

> 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's possible! Currently this is running GROUP BY queries using Socrata's query API on the original government data portal. We're adding the ability to import data from these sources into a columnar format in the future, either into Splitgraph itself or syncing the data out into Seafowl (https://seafowl.io/) which uses Parquet and is much faster.

Technically, the ability is already there (you can add a dataset to Splitgraph and select Socrata as a source if you know the dataset ID), but it's not as turnkey as landing on a dataset page and clicking a button. More to come!

Just wanted to give a shout out to Apache DataFusion[0] that IOx relies on a lot (and contributes to as well!).

It's a framework for writing query engines in Rust that takes care of a lot of heavy lifting around parsing SQL, type casting, constructing and transforming query plans and optimizing them. It's pluggable, making it easy to write custom data sources, optimizer rules, query nodes etc.

It's has very good single-node performance (there's even a way to compile it with SIMD support) and Ballista [1] extends that to build it into a distributed query engine.

Plenty of other projects use it besides IOx, including VegaFusion, ROAPI, Cube.js's preaggregation store. We're heavily using it to build Seafowl [2], an analytical database that's optimized for running SQL queries directly from the user's browser (caching, CDNs, low latency, some WASM support, all that fun stuff).

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

[1] https://github.com/apache/arrow-ballista

[2] https://github.com/splitgraph/seafowl

> "Are there examples of companies adopting this model?"

Many examples across the industry:

- Autodesk AutoCAD (closed) + Plugins/Addons (many open)

- MS Windows (closed) + Many 3rd party programs (open)

- Github (closed) + Github Actions (open)

- Npm (closed) + Npm modules (mostly open)

> "What are the potential benefits or pitfalls?"

Benefits:

- Harder to replicate, the company gets to keep the "secret sauce" a secret

- Opening up a way to "extend" the platform means 3rd party developers add value to your system

- The core isn't open, so less effort is required to maintain compare to OpenSource

Pitfalls:

- Closed-source is hard to verify, company is essentially saying "trust me bro"

- Less innovation, as user's can't contribute to the core

> "How does it impact community engagement and software adoption?"

There's hardcore FOSS advocates that will hate anything not fully open. But a business has to make money and protect it's IP, having a "closed core" is one way to do that and ensure a sustainable business model.

Another approach is the opposite, open-core + closed-premium-addons. An example of this is "React Admin"

- Open Core -> https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

- Premium Modules Offering -> https://react-admin-ee.marmelab.com/

Official Website: https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

React-Admin is a React-based frontend framework for building admin applications that talk to a backend data API. It offers a pluggable mechanism for easily adapting to the specific API style of your backend.

With these features, data fetching and forms become significantly easier to implement in React. However, creating a great user experience involves integrating all these hooks, which can be complex. Alternatively, you can use a framework like react-admin where user-friendly forms with optimistic updates are built-in.

31.react-admin

For the admin panel, or basically anything with basic crud operations, take a look at https://marmelab.com/react-admin/. Most frontend devs don't like it, since it limits you somewhat in customization, but at the same time, it is very easy to grasp for someone coming from a backend dev profile, who just wants a crud UI. It even has a guesser template that proposes an initial screen layout based on the response of your api, which you can then copy-paste and finetune. It is really made to make quick admin crud ui's.

We’ve developed a business based on an open-source platform called react-admin. Embracing the open-source spirit, we’re sharing the key performance indicators of this business. We hope it will help other open-source developers build their own business.

React-Admin: As the name suggests, this component library is targeted at building administrator interfaces for B2B (business-to-business), for example, managing users in your system. It is based on Material design and has a neat feature where you can let it “guess” your list views by providing a sample API endpoint for your data.

- We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....