whatgotdone VS pgx

I wrote a tool specifically for this, mostly inspired by the Snippets tool at Google. I've been publishing my weekly log in it every week for almost three years:

https://whatgotdone.com/michael/2021-12-03

The code is all open source if you're interested in playing around with it:

https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone

I had the same objection to SQLite, and then I heard about Litestream, and it won me over.[0]

Litestream watches your SQLite database and then streams changes to a cloud storage provider (e.g., S3, Backblaze). You get the performance and simplicity of writing SQLite to the local filesystem, but it's syncing to the cloud. And the cool part is that you don't have to change any of your application code to do it - as far as your app is concerned, it's writing to a local SQLite file.

I wrote a little log uploading utility for my business that uses Litestream, and it's been fantastic.[1] It essentially carries around its data with it, so I can deploy my app to Heroku, blow away the instance and then launch it on fly.io, and it pops up with the exact same data.[2]

I'm currently in the process of rewriting an open-source AppEngine app to use SQLite + Litestream instead of Google Firestore.[2] It's such a relief to get away from all the complexity of GCP and Firestore and get back to simple SQLite.

[0] https://litestream.io/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/litestream/

[2] https://asciinema.org/a/I2HcYheYayeh7aHj23QSY9Vyf/embed?size...

[3] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/pull/639

Sometimes, backend developers tend to opt for an ORM library because it provides an abstraction between your app and the database and thus there is little or no need to write raw queries and migrations which is nice. However, if you want to get better at writing queries (SQL for example), you need to learn how to build your repositories without an ORM. To open a database handle, you can either do it directly from the database driver or do it from database/sql with the driver passed into it. I will be opening the connection with database/sql together with pgx which is a driver and toolkit for PostgreSQL. Walk with me.

The infrastructure layer contains the concrete implementation of the repository domain interface ActivityRepository in the struct DbActivityRepository. This repository implementation uses the Postgres driver pgx and plain SQL to store the activity in the database. It uses the database transaction from the context, since the transaction was initiated by the application service.

For building the RESTful Point of Sale service API, I've considered and selected a combination of technologies that would work seamlessly together. For handling HTTP requests and responses, using the Gin HTTP web framework would make sense because I think it seems complete and popular among Go community too. To ensure data integrity and persistence, I'm using PostgreSQL database with pgx as the database driver, the reason I choose PostgreSQL because it is the most popular relational database to use in production and offers efficient Go integration. I'm also implementing caching using Redis with go-redis client library, which provides powerful in-memory data storage capabilities.

If you are willing to commit to working only with Postgres, I highly recommend pgx. Be sure you get the latest version github.com/jackc/pgx/v5. This gives you the full power of interacting with Postgres without going through an intermediate lowest-common-denominator library.

It uses pg package and pgx driver under the hood.

Starting off, is there any reason you're calling out to the CLI, instead of just using a Postgres driver like pgx? Shelling out to the command line should always be a last resort where possible as a software engineer.

For maintaining state I use PostgreSQL. Driver: https://github.com/jackc/pgx (I use the pgxpools) Along with Sqlc for generating database models and allowing me to focus on just building queries in DBeaver. https://sqlc.dev/

An example of what I'm looking for can be found here https://github.com/jackc/pgx/wiki/Getting-started-with-pgx-through-database-sql/c9f798b4d9a500fcf93931df2464af969d68f516

Except pgx recommends using their native interface, not database/sql, for performance and extra features [0], so it's not that simple in practice.

[0]: https://github.com/jackc/pgx#choosing-between-the-pgx-and-da...

pgx is “PostgreSQL driver and toolkit for Go”. Take a look at https://github.com/jackc/pgx