Primer

[qwtel]

After a decade-long NoSQL dark age, relational databases are once again gaining popularity, ushering in a new era of developer productivity through the power of string concatenation and YAGNI. Among these, SQLite stands out as the crowd favourite. From conventional in-process use cases all the way to globally distributed all purpose data stores — and everything in between — we’re nearing total SQLite mindshare saturation.

Despite its meteoric rise, the SQLite ecosystem is lacking a modern, general, web-based database editor. SQLite Viewer for VSCode (1M unique installs) and sqliteviewer.app (100k views/month) have been filling the gap somewhat, but they lack many standard features of database GUIs, such as editing data (it is a “viewer” after all), query runner, setting pragmas, and more. Some of this is due to the limitations placed on the application by their respective platforms — the web version will likely never feature writing data — but for the most part I was simply lacking the time to implement all these feature. Until now.

Over the last couple of weeks, SQLite Viewer for VS Code and beta.sqliteviewer.app have already received a flurry of updates, most notably support for reading WAL mode databases through a custom JS-based in-memory VFS. You can see latest updates in Changelog, but that’s just the beginning. Over the coming months, I’ll be implementing a whole host of missing features. Additionally, there are some unique high level goals that deserve special attention:

SQLite Viewer – Server

I’ve long been puzzled by VSCode’s lacklustre workspace.fs implementation, which is missing basic features like reading files at a set byte offset. This makes any kind of non-memory-based SQLite extension impossible, unless one escapes the “sandbox” and uses Electron/Node’s fs module or a custom binary, which in turn makes the extension incompatible with VSCode for Web, a tradeoff that I wasn’t willing to make.

That was until recently, when I learned about VS Code Server...

• Continue reading: SQLite Viewer – Server #61

WASM Devtools

The SQLite WASM ecosystem needs a SQLite Devtools Extension to bring the developer experience on par with LocalStorage and IndexedDB. Details are here:

• SQLite WASM Devtools #62

Standalone App

It's always nice to have one of those, even when they're web based. Tauri offers the kind of low footprint I am looking for, but unfortunately there's no capacity for this right now.