Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Whenever WASM SQLite comes up there is discussion as to if it would have been better for WebSQL to have become a cross browser standard.

I believe this route with WASM is the correct one. WebSQL would have been tied to one single version of SQLite, with no alternative implementation.

With browsers adopting safe low level APIs like WASM and OPFS it enables a much broader range of databases to be available in the browser. We already have SQLite, DuckDB and various vector dbs.

OPFS is still under active development, but with some of the changes coming to it in 2024 it's going to become significantly better to use.

All of this is part of the enabling tech behind "local-first" apps. I'm somewhat biased as I work on ElectricSQL (we sync Postgres on a server to SQLite in the browser), but 2024 is going to be a supper exciting time for local-first software.

> Whenever WASM SQLite comes up there is discussion as to if it would have been better for WebSQL to have become a cross browser standard.

An oft-neglected detail in such discussion is that WebSQL was main-thread-only. When WebSQL was designed that was not a serious issue, but it would have been in conflict with the directions web design has since taken, making WebSQL a non-starter for many modern apps.

> WebSQL would have been tied to one single version of SQLite, with no alternative implementation.

Not only that, but with a castrated feature set (e.g. only implicit transactions and lack of many of sqlite's SQL functions). When trying to benchmark WebSQL vs the sqlite project's WASM build, that castration makes it difficult to get apples-to-apples comparisons.

What are your thoughts around the various vector dbs (pinecone, etc)? DuckDB or pgVector or with all of the work going forward in Arrow being able to already support vectors/arrays, it seems that the specific “vector” class of db is hype/marketing.

Personally I think vector lookups make more sense as a new kind of index for existing databases, as opposed to an entirely new class of database.

Completely agree.

Have you my chance come across a good SQLite vector extension that works in the browser? I haven't found one yet.

sqlite-vss mentions WASM in a few places - https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aasg017%2Fsqlite-vss%20was... - I'm not sure how easy it is to get that running in the browser though.

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