Comments coming from a years-long Astro user that loves it. I use it to power my own website. I'm familiar with this space because I also work at Xata (take that as a disclosure).<p>This looks like a pretty simple data solution that might work for Astro's audience (content sites and hobbyists). They've split the hosting into their studio product to provide a way to earn revenue. Essentially you host the DB with them and can access it remotely, but could also host it however you want, you'd just lose the Studio editor.<p>The Studio editor itself is pretty basic at the moment with a table view and a way to check SQL calls. You can't build schemas in the UI yet and what you get is mostly a dev wrap of existing tools (like Drizzle) that let you interact with your DB. Their demo shows the limitations here, with things like "email" not being able to validate in the studio editor. My guess is that's coming later, but I might have missed it in the docs. Either way, it's nice that your config is stored at the code layer.<p>Most of these small websites that Astro is great fit need small CMS systems, and studio doesn't look to provide any way to deal with images (at least on first check) so that's sort of a bummer. You'd need to wire up some references with Cloudflare I guess. Still reading here, but it'd be cool if that came natively. Storing, retrieving and resizing images is a pain. The column types allowed are pretty small (text, number, bool, date, json).<p>While simple. It looks like it'll be relatively speedy with retrieval because of it.<p>Right now though, as an actual CMS editor (which my guess is what most Astro folks really want) Studio feels way to simple to tell a client to use. I'm interested to see whether they go more in the direction of a generic database store (implied from the name) or more of a CMS to compete with the natural pairings of Contentful, Statamic and others. Webhooks as a launch feature is great! That'll help folks out.<p>Either way. I love this team and their perspective. They build cool stuff, open source a lot of it (check out Starlight for docs), and I'm excited to see where this one goes over time. Congrats on the launch.<p>Now I need to update my Astro site to 4.5 :)
I get that all of the current generation of front-end/back-end frameworks promised their investors that they'd figure out how to sell developer services, rather than just offer open-source components with some extra commercial support options...<p>But I do wonder how this type of thing will actually compete against a billion headless CMSes and a million PaaSes already on the market...
Love that they use comments as an example. I miss this with many static blogs. HN comments are great, but I sometimes want to read a discussion between people who've actually read the article.
I dig Astro and use it to build my blog and several other tiny mostly-static sites. I'm not sure that the hosted database service fills a need I have but, in general, supported SQL integration seems like a useful addition.<p>As an aside: there are days when I wish I could avoid using the Astro component model entirely, do everything in Preact (or whatever), and still use the `client:*` directives when appropriate. I realize this is easier said than done and also probably not a reasonable thing for Astro itself to try and target -- but moving between Astro components and framework components always has just enough friction that it's something I think I'd enjoy using.
How is something like this or other services like cloudflare's D1 an actual scalable solution for any serious app? Is it the pattern where you give every customer, team or "workspace" it's own database and manage this through some distributed kv store? I am just trying to understand how this is a relevant solution and not some weird SQLlite fetishism you see going around.
Astro on a roll lately! Excited for the rest of Launch Week<p><a href="https://x.com/astrodotbuild/status/1767294849848582202" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/astrodotbuild/status/1767294849848582202</a>
What do they do to mitigate the roundtrip latency introduced by using a hosted database on a separate network? Is the idea that you wouldn't use this if you have pages that do many queries to render?
The ORM API is very reminiscent of Drizzle, which I think was a great call on Astro's side. I have so far only used Astro for SSG, but seeing code like this [1] has me interested to see how far it can go for SSR tasks that you might currently use metaframeworks such as Next/Nuxt/SolidStart/SvelteKit for.<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/astro-db/#insert" rel="nofollow">https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/astro-db/#insert</a>
I'm currently thinking about using either Astro or SvelteKit for my next project. Astro DB suggests that Astro aims to be more than just a static site builder. However, all over the internet, I read that Astro is primarily a static site builder, and if I want to build a fully-featured web application, I should use something like Next.js or SvelteKit. Now, I'm a little bit confused where Astro DB fits into this picture.
Interesting and even more compelling pricing, indeed a very generous free tier.<p>I only wish this wasn't a javascript heavy thing and that I could interface with it in my language of choice. But as it says on the tin this is integrated well for the greater Astro ecosystem.
Slightly tangential -- anyone knows how does libSQL compare to upstream SQLite for shipping with a desktop app or in the browser via wasm?<p>Edit: I've read the readme, hoping for a take from anyone who gave it a try
Not to be confused with Astra DB, Cassandra as a Service.. <a href="http://astra.datastax.com" rel="nofollow">http://astra.datastax.com</a>