[tomxor]

It really depends on the use case.

The upfront network cost will always be larger in comparison to independent queries, however the benefit will be less total network use after some threshold of searches due to eliminating the overhead of independent searches over the network. The other benefit is vastly improved latency of all searches after the initial page load.

Whether or not this makes sense is entirely subjective, it depends on the DB size, frequency of changes to affected data and the expected user behaviour... i.e is it extremely likely they will be making multiple searches.

I've not tried SQLite in the browser yet, but have used effectively the same solution for an internal tool by downloading all of the metadata needed for any possible queries from an SQL database. This worked very well under a certain size, making lightning fast, low latency local searches in the browser... but did not scale due to the particulars of the DB and the user case... eventually the initial metadata payload was not tolerable as the DB grew and the changes were frequent, requiring a new payload on every load of the page (unlike the authors use case), and so I switched to backend queries, the latency for individual queries is worse, but the total experience is better since the initial load is the same.