wp-sqlite-db VS sql.js-httpvfs

Before they added SQLite as WP plugin, I would use https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/ and I would use `define('DB_DIR', '/absolute/custom/path/to/directory/for/sqlite/database/file/');` to define the database location of my choice; I believe they would let users do the same with core support.

They basically took this implementation and just adapted it to coding standards:

https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

This has been around since some time and is itself a fork of a previous work.

The interesting part is that this drop-in replacement (mostly) already works well, there are a few issues that are related to some quirks in the WordPress core itself, for example: https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/issues/18

And maybe now they will be fixed.

Author here, here's an in-depth writeup on how this works and why it's useful:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webas...

To answer your questions directly:

WebAssembly is the magic sauce that transforms server-side code into client-side code. MySQL unfortunately is not yet supported by WebAssembly, so I applied a plugin that adds SQLite supports to WordPress [0]. The WebAssembly application has its own in-memory filesystem that lives in a specific browser tab and is scraped as soon as you close it.

So – technically it exposes db credentials, and even the entire DB, but that you are the only user of that DB so it's okay.

> What would the backend look like

The only backend is a static file server where the code and the database live. Your browser downloads a copy of the database and allows you to modify it in the current tab, but the updates are never saved back to the server.

[0] https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

1. Plugins that register their own database tables (however there already exists prior art such as https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db for handling these cases)

2. Plugins that do direct queries against the standard database schema (broadly either for invalid (bad code) or performance (valid but slim use case) reasons)

Also, WordPress would of course keep the old query functions around and they would likely add a tag to the plugin repository so authors can mark plugins as supporting thes new ORM features.

Great idea in my opinion!

There's a WordPress plugin that adds support for SQLite as an alternative to MySQL.

Apparently it works really well. The implementation is (to my) simply astonishing: they run regular expressions against the SQL to convert it from MySQL dialect to SQLite! https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/blob/9a5604cce13...

This wp-sqlite-db one. Not super active, but maintained, at least.

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...