SOLAR_FIELDS|4day ago

I just deployed a wasm built SQLite with FTS5 enabled and it’s insane what it is capable of. It’s basically elasticsearch entirely on the client. It’s not entirely as robust as ES but it’s like 80% of the way there, and I repeat, it runs on the client side on your phone or any other SQLite supported device

loeber|4day ago

In 2025, pretending that a CSV can be a reasonable alternative to a database because it is "smaller" is just wild. Totally unconscionable.

    - It's plain text
    - It's super easy to diff
    - It's a natural fit for saving it in a git repo
    - It's searchable using standard tools (grep, etc.)
    - It's easy to backup and restore
    - You don't need to worry about it getting corrupt
    - There are many tools designed to read it to produce X types of outputs

skeeter2020|4day ago

I agree on both your main points. It's not like PB has a bunch of cruft and fat to trim. The BD of the project is very aggressive in constraining scope, which is one of the reasons it's so good. The CSV-thing feels like an academic exercise. The fact I can't open an SQLite database in my text editor is a little thin, considering many tools are lighter weight than text editors, and "reading" a database (any format) is seldom the goal. You probably want to query it so the first thing you need to do here is import the CSV into DuckDB and write a bunch of queries with "WHERE active=1"

waldrews|4day ago

The append-only, text csv format you can concatenate to from a script, edit or query in a spreadsheet, and that's still fast because of the in-memory pointer cache, seems like a big win (assuming you're in the target scaling category).

bravesoul2|4day ago

For local use cases this could be useful. Run locally. Do your thing. Edit with Excel or tool of choice.

Also one less dependency.

zffr|4day ago

What’s the other candidate besides pocketbase?

gavmor|4day ago

What about those of us who use multiple devices, or multiple browsers? I've been using local storage for years and it's definitely hampering adoption, especially for multiplayer.

thomascountz|4day ago

TIL! I enjoy building cloudless apps and have been relying on localstorage for persistence with an "export" button. This is exactly what I've been looking for.

A lot of what I've read about local-first apps included solving for data syncing for collaborative features. I had no idea it could be this simple if all you need is local persistence.

gausswho|4day ago

At least on the Android front, I'd prefer the app allow me to write to my own storage target. The reason is because I already use Syncthing-Fork to monitor a parent Sync directory of stuff (Obsidian, OpenTracks, etc.) and send to my backup system. In effect it allows apps to be local first and potentially even without network access, but allow me to have automatic backups.

If there were something that formalized this a little more, developers could even make their apps in a... Bring Your Own Network... kinda way. Maybe there's already someone doing this?

nico|4day ago

> Do we still need a back-end, now that Chrome supports the File System Access API on both desktop and mobile?

Could this allow accessing a local db as well? Would love something that could allow an app to talk directly to a db that lives locally in my devices, and that the db could sync across the devices - that way I still get my data in all of my devices, but it always stays only in my devices

Of course this would be relatively straightforward to do with native applications, but it would be great to be able to do it with web applications that run on the browser

Btw, does Chrome sync local storage across devices when logged in?

thekingshorses|4day ago

Any examples?