wa-sqlite VS litestream

The word on the street is that https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite is nearly production ready, closing in on the neat 1.0.0 release, with its IDBBatchAtomic engine highly recommended at https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web. You can try out the benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html.

And the other contestant is Dexie, stable https://dexie.org/.

If you were to branch into a new venture today, which one would you pick? And why?

It seems indeed very nice, the examples are clear and everything works from async. I tried with Deno, and now experimenting with my own VFS.

It does seem to suffer from maintainer problems too though, and I don't blame Roy Hashimoto for that. I wouldn't want to maintain such an obvious wrapper when it should be a task for SQLite's team to upstream the changes.

Roy Hashimoto doesn't want to maintain it as an NPM package for instance, as it is just an experiment: https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/12

"Low traffic is a happy place - I don't have any motivation to mess with that."

This is the WASM blob and it's 1.1 MB uncompressed. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/blob/master/dist/wa-.... No issues - it's cached by cloudflare.

We're using IndexedDB. Here's a writeup on alternatives https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/85 and a benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html

I have a genuine appreciation for how Linear has built this. We have had to build something similar for our note taking application (Reflect). It is very tricky to do and I wish there was more research on this.

In my opinion, what we need is:

1) A client-side performant SQLite database that supports live queries. I.e. you can automatically re-render the page when the queries change. That way your database can drive the UI and be the source of truth in regards to what's displayed on the screen.

2) A separate realtime syncing protocol that syncs database state to client state.

And ideally this is all open source, and that these two endeavors are not coupled tightly.

[1] Wa-sqlite is the best (imo) client-side db - better than than the official Sqlite WASM build (for now) because it had a indexeddb fallback for browsers that aren't the cutting edge Chrome.

[2] cr-sqlite is an interesting project using CRDTs to sync state around. However I still believe that for many production use-cases you want a ultimate server source of truth.

[3] Replicache is still the best closed source solution I know of.

[1] - https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite

[2] https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/discussions/63

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.