wa-sqlite VS sql.js-httpvfs

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 couldn't find do these wrappers support read-only SQLite databases with HTTP range requests, like in this famous post [1]. Phiresky's wrapper supports it, but it seems to be rebuilding the whole sql.js [2], I'd rather have it as VFS on top of sqlite.org's own WASM module. I like the idea of HTTP range requests, but I don't want to run a fork, that will be unmaintained in few years.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630

[2]: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs

Oh that’s an interesting idea. I saw someone built SQLite over HTTP with the Range header: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

So presumably in a similar manner as https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs you could map SQLite pages to leaf torrents too and get the chunking you are looking for.

But ripgrep has to read the whole file; if your intended use case is searching a blog, I'd recommend using something which makes an index, so you don't need to download everything. For example, sql.js-httpvfs is SQLite ported to wasm, with the DB file read over HTTP. If you use FTS to make an index, it works astonishingly well for text search.

How close is Python SQLite and Datasette Lite to accessing a hosted SQL database using HTTP range requests as can be done in sql.js like https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs?

I put together a Pyodide-based web app where users need a few indexed queries from a 600mb SQLite database but it isn't very practical for them to download the whole thing into the browser.

https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life

You can also access sqlite databases directly from an http server that supports range requests (like s3). There are a bunch of implementations of this in different languages including Go[0] and Javascript[1].

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp

[1]: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs

Thanks to SQLite VFS abstraction, it is possible to implement your own file system on which SQLite parks data and structures. Inspired by Phiresky's sql.js-httpvfs which uses HTTP Range requests to lazy load blocks of storage from a static web server, I changed few lines of code to point the VFS read() calls to a database seeded by peers as a torrent. A 300 MiB db with 2 million records can be queried from seeders for full text searches in less than 2 MiB traffic with the BitTorrent protocol, all inside the browser, in a static website.

Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28021766 : DuckDB can query [and page] Parquet from GitHub, sql.js-httpvfs, sqltorrent, File System Access API (Chrome only so far; IDK about resource quotas and multi-GB datasets), serverless search with WASM workers

https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs :

> sql.js is a light wrapper around SQLite compiled with EMScripten for use in the browser (client-side).

> This repo is a fork of and wrapper around sql.js to provide a read-only HTTP-Range-request based virtual file system for SQLite. It allows hosting an SQLite database on a static file hoster and querying that database from the browser without fully downloading it.

> The virtual file system is an emscripten filesystem with some "smart" logic to accelerate fetching with virtual read heads that speed up when sequential data is fetched. It could also be useful to other applications, the code is in lazyFile.ts. It might also be useful to implement this lazy fetching as an SQLite VFS [*] since then SQLite could be compiled with e.g. WASI SDK without relying on all the emscripten OS emulation.

It doesn't have to be range requests, you could split the file instead of depending on the range requests. Essentially it's the same as the chunking instructions for hosters who have a maximum file size as is demonstrated here: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs/blob/master/creat...