[matlin]

PouchDB and CouchDB were what inspired me to build Triplit[1]. The idea of having an identical (or merely similar in the case of Pouch/Couch) query engine accessible on client and server is insanely powerful.

The author links to a much longer post on handling conflicts which is worthy of its length because it's not a pleasant experience with this setup.

I highly recommend trying a modern setup from one of the many new local first solutions [2]

1. https://triplit.dev

2. https://www.localfirst.fm/landscape

[mentalgear]

Great to see the founder of Triplit here! PouchDB was definitely ahead of its time, and it’s exciting to see its legacy being carried forward by so many modern local-first (lo-fi) solutions. I’ve also been a longtime fan of Triplit - its API, docs, and overall DX (plus direct community interaction) are excellent.

Also Triplit's universal client/server model means you never have to care about all the complexity of other solutions that require to get the transformations between client db & server db just right. A really impressive piece of work! (another great one with a universal db is jazz.tools, especially if you need encryption)

[exe34]

Please let's not make lo-fi mean local-first.

[elcritch]

Nice, I’ll have to try out Triplit. There’s also Couchbase which has a local sync database in C++ IIRC.

Also, heads up the first triplit link I tried gave me a 404: https://www.triplit.dev/docs/client/query/select#selecting-r...

[WorldMaker]

Couchbase had a lot of subtle incompatibilities with PouchDB in my attempts to use it on a past project. The big one I recall was that Couchbase had far more restrictions on key names and that required some workarounds.

(Though to be fair Apache has been threatening to shrink the key space greatly as well with the considered move to the Foundation-based "CouchDB 4.0".)

[elcritch]

Ah good to know. For my use cases I would probably be looking at Couchbase Lite [1] not PouchDB. I’d be more concerned about file attachment sizes and syncing.

1: https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-C

[WorldMaker]

That's a related thing I learned from that past project: file attachments are also extremely vulnerable to compatibility issues between CouchDB/PouchDB/Couchbase/Cloudant/etc. Even when they claim to support sizes large enough, they often fail to sync even when small. Attachments in general in the CouchDB protocol are a bottleneck that slows or effectively breaks sync if you have too many to sync at once, because most CouchDB-ish implementations tend to only process a single document at once among other factors.

The project I was working on involved regularly taking some photos and all the sync issues with attachments led to moving to syncing only metadata like width, height, and Blurhashes in the database itself and use a reference URL/pointer to a content-addressed storage (basically an S3 bucket-like with git-like hashes for filenames) we could background sync more directly outside of the CouchDB protocol. (Blurhashes were particularly useful there while waiting on that additional background sync phase after the CouchDB sync.)

[matlin]

Great catch, fixed!

[felideon]

Is Triplit overkill (over PouchDB) if multi-user collaboration is not a use case?

[4b11b4]

How does Triplit compare to InstantDB?

[mentalgear]

it's fully open-source for once

[nezaj]

Instant founder here! We're fully open source :)

https://github.com/instantdb/instant

[justanotheratom]

triplit sounds awesome. Any precedence of someone using it from a native iOS app?

[matlin]

With React Native yes but not yet with Swift. There's been quite a few requests to my surprise through--I figured CloudKit, etc would be sufficient on iOS but I don't have experience there.

[justanotheratom]

CloudKit not cross platform