Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?

#1

Post by kizer » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 12:43 PM UTC

I’m talking about the browser-based database API that is more robust purportedly than localStorage.

Looking for interesting use-cases.

Re: Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?

#2

Post by evrimfeyyaz » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

I use it on a simple website I built: https://covid19incharts.com

This website fetches the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 data from GitHub (in CSV files), and fetching this every single user action is not feasible.

When a user first enters the website, this data is fetched from GitHub, parsed and formatted, and stored in IndexedDB (until it's deemed "stale").

I first used Local Storage, but I needed more space than most browsers allow on Local Storage, so I moved to IndexedDB.

By the way, the API of IndexedDB is somewhat awkward, but there are great libraries like IDB (https://github.com/jakearchibald/idb) that make it much more developer-friendly.

Re: Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?

#3

Post by yen223 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

I've used it in a personal React note-taking app project, to add basic offline functionality.

It's a nice idea, and it's pretty magical to be able to build an interactive website that can work fully offline. That said, there are some pitfalls you have to watch out for, e.g. database connection contention if you have multiple tabs to the same origin open.

The lack of great tooling around indexeddb is also a bummer. Something like TablePlus but for indexeddb would be great.

Re: Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?

#4

Post by kizer » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:02 AM UTC

evrimfeyyaz wrote: post #2

I use it on a simple website I built: https://covid19incharts.com This website fetches the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 data from GitHub (in CSV files), and fetching this every single user action is not feasible. When a user first enters the website, this data is fetched from GitHub, parsed and formatted, and stored in IndexedDB (until it's deemed "stale"). I first used Local Storage, but I needed more space tha…

Cool! I figure now that it’s mostly used to cache (relational/made relational) datasets.

Re: Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?

#5

Post by kizer » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #3

I've used it in a personal React note-taking app project, to add basic offline functionality. It's a nice idea, and it's pretty magical to be able to build an interactive website that can work fully offline. That said, there are some pitfalls you have to watch out for, e.g. database connection contention if you have multiple tabs to the same origin open. The lack of great tooling around indexeddb is also a bummer. So…

Seems like overkill in that case, unless you were using just because. Thanks for the additional information.