I'm not an expert and every distributed database is different. My intuition about strapping a consensus library to a database is that you're going to have way higher latency because every operation, writes and reads, must go through consensus. (IIRC some databases like Cockroach mitigate this by having many mini Raft clusters rather than one single one [which IIRC is how rqlite works anyway].)<p>The advantage you undeniably get is durability/high availability.<p>> Scalability: Distributed databases can be scaled horizontally by adding more nodes to the network, making handling larger amounts of data and higher volumes of requests easier.<p>This is only possible if you have a data partitioning scheme, right? But data partitioning is sort of a different problem from consensus/HA, right? If you do the simplest version of a consensus + database implementation, every disk on every instance of the consensus cluster is basically identical. So you don't benefit in that simple approach from adding more disks. It potentially just makes write latency worse unless you do flexible quorums so the quorum size is independent of the number of nodes in the cluster?<p>> Localized access: With a distributed database, data can be stored closer to the users who need it, which can improve response times and reduce network latency.<p>This would also only be true if you relax consistency requirements, right? If you need to be at the highest level of consistency you must send reads through consensus too otherwise if you read from the node nearest you it may be out of date.<p>It would be cool to see some numbers about the difference between latency of reads/writes in sqlitecloud and sqlite on a single node! It would help my intuition anyway.
Seems similar to <a href="https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite">https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite</a> or <a href="https://dqlite.io" rel="nofollow">https://dqlite.io</a>.<p>Would be interesting to see a breakdown of the differences.
Totally unrelated to the content, but it's interesting to see these types of articles clearly using something like Midjourney to generate their header images. It almost feels like a dream-state when I first land on the page... my brain can't totally parse what I'm looking at on this one, for example. For me, that was actually pretty distracting.
Marco, you're probably going to want to rethink your branding. It sounds like you're associated SQLite officially, when AFAIK this isn't the case (?)<p>The code is open source, but the name is a registered trademark. Similar issue here:
<a href="https://github.com/vapor/sqlite-kit/issues/47">https://github.com/vapor/sqlite-kit/issues/47</a>
I'm curious about sending changesets instead of commands.<p>I get there are some things are nondeterministic, but I'm surprised that they couldn't be converted into deterministic commands before sending them out. E.g. send the result of `RANDOM()` instead of the call itself.<p>I don't know how much that would buy you, but I'd imagine it might make the amount of information to send much smaller.
Where are the specs of the offering?<p>I couldn't find information on the maximum DB size, maximum number of connections, network throughput, datacenter locations and other basic information. The screenshot on the homepage clearly shows that there is a disk and CPU limitation.<p>It looks like this is a database with an SQLite API but internally it could be anything.
I love that the rqlite author has chimed in here.<p>Anyone know how this compares to the work done by litestream: <a href="https://litestream.io/how-it-works/" rel="nofollow">https://litestream.io/how-it-works/</a><p>Is this a fundamentally different idea: consistency vs. replication?
The most interesting thing for me in this is the article implies that they offer globally distributed consensus. Not sure if this is their actual offering too, but the example of NYC and Signapore implies this. While reads would be fine, the latency for writes could be atleast 2*250ms (roughly the speed between furthest AWS regions). I can still see this useful for applications that require strong consistency and global distribution, but likely a niche. Would be real interesting to see some actual numbers!
Is this somehow related to rqlite? <a href="https://rqlite.io/" rel="nofollow">https://rqlite.io/</a><p>The architecture is very similar.
I see a lot of this kind of stuff but does anybody know what the actual DBA/SA story is for some big SQLite cluster? What if you have a non-trivial amount of data and you actually care about it? Do you just have a bunch of 800 gigabyte db.sqlite files sitting around?
Looking at the SQLite Cloud repo on GitHub, it seems like the docs and SDK are open sourced.<p>Is there a plan to Open Source the server side code as well? :)