[whereistejas]

This actually looks very useful. Cloudflare seems to be brining together a great set of tools. Not to mention, D2 is literally the only sqlite-as-a-service solution out there whose reliability is great and free tier limits are generous.

[eis]

D1 reliability has been bad in our experience. We've had queries hanging on their internal network layer for several seconds, sometimes double digits over extended periods (on the order of weeks). Recently I've seen a few times plain network exceptions - again, these are internal between their worker and the D1 hosts. And many of the hung queries wouldn't even show up under traces in their observability dashboard so unless you have your own timeout detection you wouldn't even know things are not working. It was hard to get someone on their side to take a look and actually acknowledge and understand the problem.

But even without network issues that have plagued it I would hesitate to build anything for production on it because it can't even do transactions and the product manager for D1 openly stated they wont implement them [0]. Your only way to ensure data consistency is to use a Durable Object which comes with its own costs and tradeoffs.

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/issues/2733#issuec...

The basic idea of D1 is great. I just don't trust the implementation.

For a hobby project it's a neat product for sure.

[ignoramous]

> And many of the hung queries wouldn't even show up under traces in their observability dashboard

How did you work around this problem? As in, how do you monitor for hung queries and cancel them?

> D1 reliability has been bad in our experience.

What about reads? We use D1 in prod & our traffic pattern may not be similar to yours (our workload is async queue-driven & so retries last in order of weeks), nor have we really observed D1 erroring out for extended periods or frequently.

[eis]

> How did you work around this problem? As in, how do you monitor for hung queries and cancel them?

You just wrap your DB queries in your own timeout logic. You can then continue your business logic but you can't truly cancel the query because well, the communication layer for it is stuck and you can't kill it via a new connection. Your only choice is to abandon that query. Sometimes we could retry and it would immediately succeed suggesting that the original query probably had something like packetloss that wasn't handled properly by CF. Easy when it's a read but when you have writes then it gets complicated fast and you have to ensure your writes are idempotent. And since they don't support transactions it's even more complex.

Aphyr would have a field day with D1 I'd imagine.

> What about reads? We use D1 in prod & our traffic pattern may not be similar to yours (our workload is async queue-driven & so retries last in order of weeks), nor have we really observed D1 erroring out for extended periods or frequently.

We have reads and writes which most of the time are latency sensitive (direct user feedback). A user interaction can usually involve 3-5 queries and they might need to run in sequence. When queries take 500ms+ the system starts to feel sluggish. When they take 2-3s it's very frustrating. The high latencies happened for both reads and writes, you can do a simple "SELECT 123" and it would hang. You could even reproduce that from the Cloudflare dashboard when it's in this degradated state.

From the comments of others who had similar issues I think it heavily depends on the CF locations or D1 hosts. Most people probably are lucky and don't get one of the faulty D1 servers. But there are a few dozen people who were not so lucky, you can find them complaining on Github, on the CF forum etc. but simply not heard. And you can find these complaints going back years.

This long timeframe without fixes to their network stack (networking is CF's bread and butter!), the refusal to implement transactions, the silence in their forum to cries for help, the absurdly low 10GB limit for databases... it just all adds up. We made the decision to not implement any new product on D1 and just continue using proper databases. It's a shame because workers + a close-by read replica could be absolutely great for latency. Paradoxically it was the opposite outcome.

[brikym]

There is always one thing that bites you because Cloudflare is different. I just built an AI game (sleuththetruth.com) and the primary reason it's so slow to prompt a new board is actually not because of AI latency. It's because CF workers have a limit of 6 connections (including spawned workers). There is no way to gulp down all the wiki images I want all at once. If I had put the backend on Railway I don't think I'd have this issue.

[kentonv]

You can farm out the requests to a bunch of Durable Objects. Each DO will have a separate six-concurrent limit. And you can send unlimited concurrent requests to Durable Objects. (This is not an exploit, this is working as intended. The concurrency limit exists to prevent creating excessive connections from a single machine; farming to DOs means the requests are spread out.)

Also note that as of recently, the concurrent limit applies only up to the point that response headers are received, not during body streaming.

[brikym]

Great tip. I knew about #2 which still doesn't help me but #1 is nowhere in their docs!

[vjerancrnjak]

just keep-alive it with pipelining, depending on the server, 100k+ RPS.

[kylehotchkiss]

* D1, but agreed. I wish Cloudflare would offer a built-in D1-R2 backups system though! (Can be done with custom code in a worker, but wish it was first-party)

[Normal_gaussian]

yeah this really sucks.

No downtime snapshots would be the best but I'd be quite happy with a blocking backup on a set schedule that can be set from the GUI / from the cli / from a config file. Its a huge PITA having to play 'trust me bro' to clients and their admins with custom workers and backups.

I currently stream it D1 dump -> worker(encrypt w/ key wrapping) -> R2 on a schedule, then have a container spin up once a day and create changesets from the dumps. An external tool pulls the dumps and changesets.

[whereistejas]

would https://litestream.io/ be a good solution here?

[BoorishBears]

> For those who don’t use Workers, we’ll be releasing REST API support in the coming weeks, so you can access the full model catalog from any environment.

Cloudflare seems to be building for lock-in and I don't love it. I especially don't understand how you build an OpenRouter and only have bindings for your custom runtime at launch.

[switz]

Workers runtime is open source and permissively licensed fwiw

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

[eis]

Yes but that is just a tiny part of the whole CF worker ecosystem. The other services are not open source and so the lock-in is very very real. There are no API compatible alternatives that cover a good chunk of the services. If you build your application around workers and make use of the integrated services and APIs there is no way for you to switch to another provider because well, there is none.

[mikeocool]

Agreed -- except that all of their docs and marketing pitches it for use cases like "per-user, per-tenant or per-entity databases" -- which would be SO great.

But in practice, it's basically impossible to use that way in conjunctions with workers, since you have to bind every database you want to use to the worker and binding a new database requires redeploying the worker.

[AgentME]

If you want to dynamically create sqlite databases, then moving to durable objects which are each backed by an sqlite database seems to be the way to go currently.

[eis]

And now you've put everything on the equivalent of a single NodeJS process running on a tiny VM. Next step: spread out over multiple durable objects but that means implementing a sharding logic. Complexity escalates very fast once you leave toy project territory.

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

Yeah but the 10GB limit for D1 is crazy, can you really start building on that? Other than toy projects?

[jillesvangurp]

Most website content management systems would never get close to that size. If you need a bigger database, D1 is probably the wrong solution to begin with. 10GB can be millions of records depending on your table structure. But if you are gathering some survey data, running a CMS, etc. you probably should be fine with even just a few MB of data; which is probably the sweet spot for D1.

[dpark]

Really depends on what you’re putting in the DB. Cloudflare is clear that these are supposed to be very localized DBs. Per user or tenant.

[chrisldgk]

Per their own docs, D1 is primarily meant for things like Auth DBs that you have frequent read/write access to but that store limited amounts of data. If you need more storage, running Postgres somewhere else and querying via Hyperdrive is probably what you want to do instead.

[ncrmro]

Turso/libsql has been great for poc project so far