[hitekker]

Edit: Nolan replied before and corrected me. I've removed my misinterpretation and kept my main point below.

Back in the day, there were people who strongly suggested MongoDB and IndexedDB were the future, and that PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite were trash. I've noticed the folks who rode that hype-train moved into other kinds of occupations that aren't exactly engineering-focused anymore.

[nolanl]

I wrote that article 7 years ago, and FWIW I would side more with Dale these days. It's probably a good thing we didn't just slap a half-baked API on top of SQLite and call it a web standard.

The biggest problem is that yeah, WebSQL tends to be faster than IndexedDB. Or at least it was back when I was working on PouchDB. Biggest issue IIRC was that joins were faster in SQLite than implementing the same thing in userland on top of IndexedDB. Browsers eventually shipped getAll/getAllKeys which also helped with cursor slowness.

I haven't looked much at the Storage Foundation API [1], but it seems like a more reasonable approach moving forward. Just give developers the low-level tools and let them build SQLite on top of it. Also the Chromium devs have been working on relaxed durability, which apparently improves IDB perf in some scenarios [2] (although still not as fast as Firefox it seems [3]).

[1]: https://github.com/WICG/storage-foundation-api-explainer

[2]: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730701489995776

[3]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102545...

[dmitriid]

> Consensus & Standardization

> Firefox: Negative [1]

> Safari: Negative [2]

However, I fully expect Chrome to ship it in stable sometime soon, like they do with dozens of other APIs.

There are now four different half-baked storage/file api proposals, at least one of them is already in stable Chrome... it's a mess.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/481

[2] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-February/...