sql.js VS absurd-sql

Hi HN! A friend and I were inspired by projects like https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js and the idea of querying files served over CDN with HTTP range requests. We started thinking: what would a database that was specifically designed for this type of use case look like? So we started building one, and we landed on a functional prototype that we're pretty proud of!

With our prototype, Appendable, we're able to serve and query large (GB+) datasets by hosting them on a static file host like Amazon S3 or Cloudflare R2 without running a separate server and worrying about things like tail latency, replication, and connection pooling -- all that is handled for us by the file hoster.

Additionally, one tenet that we have been following is Appendable won't touch your underlying data, so your jsonl file is preserved and we point at that data instead of consuming it into an Appendable-specific file format. This keeps your data yours and makes it easy to introspect the data: just open it up with your favorite editor aka vim.

We're curious what you think, we're excited to build this out further to get the performance even better and add features like pubsub. Everything is open source at https://github.com/kevmo314/appendable.

Kevin and Matthew

My project is powered by sql.js, I recommend checking that out if you're interested - https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js/

Maybe you can try to use some SQL database compiled as Web Assembly Modules? Like this one for example: https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js

If you want to have persistence, then I would go with a database like Dexie, as it uses IndexedDB and has transactions. If you just want something that's in memory, you could look at Sql.js or something simple like lowdb.

not necessarily. you can host an html/js/sqlite site on github pages for free. json -> sqlite3 js -> sql

Link: https://sql.js.org

Does it work with really large files? Like, >100mb or so. I was considering making something similar but with sqlite.js [1], but the problem with it is that it loads everything in memory, so I wasn't entirely sure how it will deal with larger workloads.

[1]: https://sql.js.org/#/

Not really, but I'm aware of absurd-sql. Note that this requires IndexedDB and thus a browser environment.

I don't need SQL capabilities, so I didn't look into those options (there's also absurd-sql, which ports sqlite to the browser on top of IndexedDB).

Ironically I was just about to drop in absurd-sql [1] to a project, which uses indexeddb to back SQLite. This seems better.

[1] https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql

There is also absurd-sql that is sqlite3 in wasm using IndexDB as storage and it’s faster than IndexDB itself

[1]: https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql

Offline data: running it in the browser for an offline cache, similar to sql.js or absurd-sql.

We are very close to having WASM SQLite with persistence in the web platform. Until now SQLite compiled to WASM was in memory and you had to write the whole database out as a binary array to save changes. There is absurd-sql (https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql), which builds a virtual file system on top of IndexedDB for sqlite, its incredible, but a bit of an ugly hack.

However, the new file-access apis (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...) that are landing in browsers will fix this. One of the things it does is enable very efficient block level read/write access to a privet sandboxed filesystem for the websites origin, perfect for persistent sqlite. There is more here: https://web.dev/file-system-access/#accessing-files-optimize...