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Serverless SQLite

sql.lspgn.workers.dev

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Re: Serverless SQLite

#141

Post by recursive »

scrollaway wrote: post #139
recursive wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it's not made out of an English language construction which is actually just wrong.

The english language has a bazillion "wrong" constructions. What is this, kindergarten? Serverless clearly has gotten a specific meaning in the industry, which means "without manually spinning up servers".

> The english language has a bazillion "wrong" constructions.

Sometimes I complain about some of those too.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the next loop around, when the concept is rediscovered again. It will need a new name. Unfortunately, that's probably going to be 20 or 30 years.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#142

Post by qapla »

simonw wrote: post #68

This is really clever. I've been wanting to try the WASM version of SQLite for something - this is a really smart usage of it. My https://datasette.io/ project is built around a similar idea to this: the original inspiration for it was Zeit Now (now Vercel) and my realization that SQLite read-only workloads are an amazing fit for serverless providers, since you don't need to pay for an additional database server - yo…

I’m using the WASM SQLite (in the browser) for a BI product [1] I’m working on.

It’s been working extremely well and it runs fully sandboxed in a separate worker thread with zero network traffic after the source data has been transferred across. With computational notebooks running alongside it, you can do some pretty powerful analytics with very low latency and it’s great to be able to do inserts and complex queries entirely client-side.

SQLite is one of the greatest software projects I know.

1. https://www.rationalbi.com

Re: Serverless SQLite

#143

Post by recursive »

ben_w wrote: post #140
pdimitar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "industry" is comprised of much more than techies -- there are millions of marketing people out there who get hyped up at the shallowest sounding buzzword and we absolutely never will out-shout them. Nor do customers who love buzzwords.

Buzzwords can be fickle things. “Wireless” used to mean radio. Who calls the internet “the information superhighway” anymore? “Computer” used to be a job title. How many job ads capitalise “PC/MAC” even though it’s a contraction of Macintosh and not an initialism like Personal Computer is? The first “tablet” I bought was a Wacom — an accessory, not a computer in its own right. When did we stop calling pocket computer…

"Digital" used to mean something that related to fingers or toes. Then it meant "electronic". Now it means "distributed via network instead of physical medium", even though it's the first "D" in "DVD".

Re: Serverless SQLite

#144

Post by yepthatsreality »

sbergot wrote: post #62
peterkelly wrote: post #2

https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html (first published 2007, before the more recent misuse of the term began)

I think I will always struggle to understand the popularity of the term serverless. From the two definitions found in https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html classic serverless --> "embedded database" exists and is often used neo-serverless --> I suspect that this is a marketing term used to attract cool people to new cloud offerings (like "jamstack" for services such as netlify). There is no good replacement here bec…

All this serverless talk is just marketing speak for limited shared-hosting environment.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#145

Post by jssmith »

sorenbs wrote: post #108
jssmith wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your writeup and the potential use cases therein. We've been building an experimental shared file system that specifically targets the FaaS setting. It supports SQLite and gets big performance gains over NFS/EFS, especially on read-mostly workloads, due to improved local caching and lock elision. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09845

Really interesting. How do you deal with ephemeral file storage? I guess you actually need the provider (say AWS) to build this into the platform?

Yes, the idea is that the cloud provider should offer something like this. We intercepted system calls to simulate what it would look like.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#146

Post by btilly »

specialist wrote: post #135
sbergot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I will always struggle to understand the popularity of the term serverless. From the two definitions found in https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html classic serverless --> "embedded database" exists and is often used neo-serverless --> I suspect that this is a marketing term used to attract cool people to new cloud offerings (like "jamstack" for services such as netlify). There is no good replacement here bec…

I really thought we'd have grid computing, aka utility computing. Running our self-contained software agents, persisting data and state in ubiquitous tuplespaces. That's my excuse for being so slow to grasp "cloud". When AWS made EC2 public, I really didn't understand why anyone would want to use it. Cloud era "serverless" just pisses me off. The applicable cliche is "Every sufficiently complex C project recreates LI…

That's Greenspun's 10th rule. The full version of which is, "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp."

Robert Morris' addendum is, "Including Common Lisp."

If you don't believe Robert Morris, tell me what LOOP does. :-)

(Note, this is the Robert Morris who wrote the first major internet worm, cofounded Viaweb with Paul Graham, and cofounded YCombinator, again with Paul Graham.)

Re: Serverless SQLite

#147

Post by chalst »

scrollaway wrote: post #139
recursive wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it's not made out of an English language construction which is actually just wrong.

The english language has a bazillion "wrong" constructions. What is this, kindergarten? Serverless clearly has gotten a specific meaning in the industry, which means "without manually spinning up servers".

It's jargon used by part of the industry. It's not like the usual irregularities of natural language. There's no need to encourage its wider adoption.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#148

Post by coliveira »

scrollaway wrote: post #139
recursive wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it's not made out of an English language construction which is actually just wrong.

The english language has a bazillion "wrong" constructions. What is this, kindergarten? Serverless clearly has gotten a specific meaning in the industry, which means "without manually spinning up servers".

And this is how the English language has become what it is. If someone politely points out that the use of a word is incorrect, instead of thanking and correcting themselves, people just shrug and say: "it is what it is" and continue to spread the incorrect usage. I even wonder why bother with grammar in a language like this.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#149

Post by kentonv »

pdimitar wrote: post #132
mwcampbell wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that if enough of us push back, then people will stop using that term. After all, "the industry" is made up of people whose minds we can attempt to change.

The "industry" is comprised of much more than techies -- there are millions of marketing people out there who get hyped up at the shallowest sounding buzzword and we absolutely never will out-shout them. Nor do customers who love buzzwords.

It's not just marketers. The vast majority of engineers are just fine with this term. The set of people complaining about it are a tiny minority.

I'm the lead engineer on Cloudflare Workers. We didn't originally call it "serverless", but after talking to lots of engineers who said "Oh so it's serverless?" we decided to go with that term. The decision was not made by marketers.

Re: Serverless SQLite

#150

Post by dakna »

sbergot wrote: post #62
peterkelly wrote: post #2

https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html (first published 2007, before the more recent misuse of the term began)

I think I will always struggle to understand the popularity of the term serverless. From the two definitions found in https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html classic serverless --> "embedded database" exists and is often used neo-serverless --> I suspect that this is a marketing term used to attract cool people to new cloud offerings (like "jamstack" for services such as netlify). There is no good replacement here bec…

I think the term is just fine. For me it doesn't mean that there is no server involved to run the app, it means I'm not involved to run the server.
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