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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Don't give the user a mental model that reality can break ... badly, or invisibly

I fear sync'ing databases instead of client server models is one of those - either your sync mechanism will just melt, or there are deep assumptions not met

Inwoukd feel safer building a set of CRDT primitives to work with if I feel the need for fast UI and stick with forms submit for everything else -

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I agree! One of my goals is to make the mental model of SQLSync easy to grok for the developers using it. I'm biased, but I find the rebase model much easier to understand than CRDTs.

I feel like you might be miss the point of the parent comment. Synchronizing between databases is a notoriously difficult problem. It's really hard to do while avoiding race conditions. To be fair, I don't understand the "git rebase" technique your project uses, but I'm doubtful it solves these problems.

The underlying issue is that users of SQLsync are going to assume that consistency works, but in suble and unsuspecting ways it won't.

As far as I can tell, the only solutions that handle distributed consistency are those that use CRDTs.

I've thought a lot about this, but sure there are still some rough edges to figure out. See this comment for a bit more of a deep dive into how SQLSync works and why it might be possible to make it easier for devs to write correct code that converges. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38502987

Also, I'm considering adding a CRDT column type to SQLite to enable embedded collaborative use cases while using the relational model for the rest of your data's structure.

A CRDT column type in a relational DB would be amazing for some things I’ve built. I’m really happy to see what you’re doing here!

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