Offline Capabilities?

[AgarwalPragy]

Offline first apps deliver a better experience when the user goes offline. They also offer a snappier experience in general thanks to the client-side cache.

Are there any plans for supporting offline-first capabilities to surreal db, especially the features highlighted in these essays

1. https://stopa.io/post/279
2. https://stopa.io/post/296

[tobiemh]

Hi @AgarwalPragy , absolutely - this is a definite intention for SurrealDB. And that's the whole reason why SurrealDB is designed to run embedded in the browser, as well as in a server environment...

We're not fully set on the implementation details of this at the moment. We've looked at Operational Transformation, and CRDTs, and we would ideally like to find a middle ground between them (in terms of offline support / speed / being able to operate as a full database), which is an area of research which is seeing more interest at the moment!

[iyobo]

Offline-first and multi-user data online sync would make me dump my [p|c]ouchDB stack and jump on surrealDB immediately.

[Vendrieou]

agree!

[davidjeba]

With tight integration with Cloudflare, the database on the edge will/can act as distributed endpoint for lower latency

[tslocke]

Any update @tobiemh ?

[mghase]

any update please

[gedw99]

Would be create to use crdt because tikv uses raft and a network partition or network lag means your view of the data is potentially old. It’s such an age old problem :)

crdt is best of both worlds in that it embraces the reality that the data you have might be old.

It’s a global solution for the reality that the server is in a way offline or shall we say “ lagging “.

Along with this same problem domain is schema evolution. So you may have 100 versions of data type x , but the shape of those 100 versions of X could be different too.

I heard that the kv store needs to support range queries ?

[Alexfilus]

I was looking something like that.
I need something with can be easily used as embedded database, and synchronizing with remote server witch storing data for all users.

[gedw99]

Well the tikv requires an always on system.

the nats kv can work when offline. That’s why I suggested ( I think ) to use NATS in leaf mode .
if you know nats jetstream it’s obvious how this can be a nice replication sub system for the DB.

Marmot uses NATS to do the same thing for SQLite .

https://github.com/maxpert/marmot

I am considering doing the same with Surreal db but can’t find an API to write to . The docs don’t explain it . I heard that range queries are needed which sounds very s3 ish .

[JasCodes]

@tobiemh is this on back-burner?

[adamski]

I arrived here after discovering SurrealDB. I am also looking for an "offline-first" data sync solution that syncs between server and local.
Current solution I've been planning is to sync JSON between SQLite and Postgres.

SurrealDB looks amazing but I can't find anything on synchronisation between embedded and server.

[JasCodes]

https://github.com/electric-sql/electric

much better for postgres -> sqlite

[adamski]

I went with RealmDB in the end. I need a C++ SDK. Theirs has reached preview stage, almost production ready.

[tantaman]

There's also https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite which is a SQLite extension and is available anywhere SQLite is. The API is available over SQL so it'll work with any language that has SQLite bindings.

I'm working on a revised iteration that allows using any DB on the backend you'd like (e.g., postgres, mysql, surreal). That is many months out, however.

[davidlondono]

I need multi tenant solution
So on local support multi users and multi projects

I had to develop a layer on top of sqlite for that but is not native.

Can subrrealdb be the solution?

[davidhmays]

Any updates on this? @tobiemh

[JasCodes]

I did ask @tobiemh in QnA, this is not on near term horizon. I can understand, its very complicated problem.