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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

I can’t fully put my finger on why exactly, but I feel that this is a transformative idea. What’s to stop me from emulating a private SQLite DB for every user of a web app, and use that instead of GraphQL?

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I have software deployed that depends on locally run (MySQL) DBs sitting on user/retail outlet machines, and I could think of a few reasons. Big data downloads, modifying anything about the data structure can cause breakage between the middleware and the DB, you're basically distributing a data model along with what should normally be serverside code to the client. Conceptually it's great but for large data, I'd hate to be paying for the bandwidth if it were public. And if it's not just a web page, you need a way to update it on every platform. Also, there are always things in a web app that simply cannot be client-side because they'd pose a security threat.

The concept reminds me a little bit of CD-ROM multimedia, in that it's so self-contained. For something like that it's great.

Nothing stopping you doing that right now with localStorage or IndexedDB. The issue is the browser cannot be trusted to keep that data, or at least these APIs aren't designed for long-term persistent storage. If we could solve this problem, we could go a long way towards some level of decentralisation. On the other hand, which is more secure? Your service or the user's machine. So there's a lot to consider.

>> If we could solve this problem, we could go a long way towards some level of decentralisation

I've heard variations of this batted around recently. Specifically, if we could allow web apps out of the sandbox so they could work like native apps, or have more access to the file system, we could maybe work our way out of the walled gardens and into totally distributed storage / processing / hosting. And it's true, it's just that...

>> On the other hand, which is more secure? Your service or the user's machine.

This.

Wouldn't such a model limit the user to just one device? Usually there's no sync of localStorage across devices.

If I'm understanding your scenario, I think PouchDB and CouchDB kind of address this concern, but for IndexexDB.

IMHO this reduces the need for a full fledged database serving read only information at scale. The restriction before this is that a SQLite file had to be on a single server. Now, having SQLite on S3, you could write a set of scalable web services on top of the file on S3 and scale those services as much as needed.

Nothing, I'm sure, but the idea behind GraphQL is that you can query all of the different backend services you have in a single request, reducing the network latency associated with firing off requests to all those services individually. It would seem that an emulated SQLite database would bring you right back to having to perform multiple network requests, assuming your data needs are more complex than a single relation. Under normal usage, SQLite avoids the N+1 problem by not having IPC overhead, but that wouldn't apply here.

Yes, I was just thinking the same thing. It would be very interesting to skip GraphQL altogether using this alongside RESTful APIs.

You don't own the database. You can't be sure it's not being tampered with, and joining any other users' data together still requires your own backend. You also can't promise data won't be lost.

As another reply said, this could be useful for data-intensive readonly applications.

How about running GraphQL on top of it?

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