[sujayakar]

hey, sujay (the author) here! happy to answer any questions about the post or convex more generally.

[nextworddev]

Hey there! Seems like a BaaS product. What problem areas do you think Convex solves the best among other alternatives?

[xixixao]

1. Consistent reactive UI - better UX and better DevX

2. Transactional by default - avoids concurrency bugs in production

3. End-to-end type safety, best-in-class TypeScript support for React and the backend

4. Explicit indexing for predictable backend performance in production (no unexpected deopts)

5. Super fast DevX: Save and have your code deployed. Flexible (optional) schema. Powerful reactive dashboard.

6. Feature-full: File storage, scheduling, text search, vector search all built in.

On the cons side: Auth story isn’t as streamlined as for Firebase or Supabase if you don’t want to use Clerk or Auth0. But we’re working on it!

[waldrews]

How would you approach audit trail/soft delete scenarios?

[xixixao]

Since it’s really application specific (what rows should be soft deleted, is recovery possible…), you probably want to model these like any other state. With Convex you can do things like schedule a deletion mutation 30 days from now, or run a cron job that cleans up data out of retention.

Is this what you had in mind?

[waldrews]

I guess I'm just wishing for an insta-backend with a database layer that's auditable/temporal by default (like Datomic). Guess that's orthogonal to the problems you're solving.

[xixixao]

This is kind of how Convex works under the hood, and so we might add more temporal/auditing functionality in the future (like a time-traveling debugger).

You could also implement this on top of Convex, if it makes sense for your write volume.