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Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

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Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#72

Post by nathancahill »

samwillis wrote: post #66
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #60

Any specific reason it wouldn't work with Angular as well (noticed it was not listed in the Frontend frameworks section)?

Not at all, it's perfectly possible to use it with Angular. While we haven't built any specific helpers for Angular, like we have for React, our TypeScript client is perfectly useable from any JS/TS framework or project.

What does the local client side look like? Could it be wrapped in a node daemon to sync to a local SQLite file?

Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#73

Post by hultner »

I have a side project where this would fit perfectly. I’ve for a database in Postgres and my plan have been to sync the data into a local SQLite for a react-native app which needs to work offline and with flaky connections, to then later sync it back into PG. I have never gotten around to actually build the sync and it looks like this could solve that problem.

Does this play nice with RLS? I’m running everything on Postgrest at the moment.

Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#74

Post by mnahkies »

vbalegas wrote: post #70
vekker wrote: post #56

Wow, this is awesome! I've been "waiting" for a project like this for years - having to roll out my own syncing solution for my local-first app until now. I have yet to dive deeper in the docs and examples, but does anyone know how easy it would be with Electric to provide some kind of client-side transformations (encryption/decryption) of specific fields or entire rows in your SQLite db before syncing? A major reaso…

Valter from Electric here, Handling encryption/decryption of user data is one of our priorities. We're thinking along the lines of adding hooks for transforming data as you're seeing it. We're getting there on permissions implementations. If you want to do row-based filtering based on user_id today, you can add a special column 'electric_user_id' to your table: https://electric-sql.com/docs/reference/roadmap#shapes W…

Are you / have you considered leveraging postgres' row level security for this (row filtering)? Feels like a natural fit for ensuring the right subset of data gets to the right users https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html

E2E encryption would also be nice to have, it could be worth having a look at https://www.etesync.com/ for inspiration

Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#75

Post by jchw »

I saw this recently and I am really excited for, hopefully, a renaissance in local-first apps; it's been quite a long time coming. That said, it seems like there's still a lot of problems to work on in this space and it'll take a while for different approaches and implementations to approach their local maxima.

I am curious about encryption. Assuming that ElectricSQL is handling essentially all of the syncing, is it possible to build applications that use end-to-end encryption for some of their state? I am wondering specifically because CRDTs seem to simplify E2EE a lot since well, any client that can write can resolve conflicts any time. I haven't looked very deeply yet as I've been very busy, but to me that's the main thing I've been really curious about. I know you can at least do this with Y.js which helpfully provides a way to use symmetric encryption for WebRTC synchronization, but this obviously is a whole lot more than that.

Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#78

Post by ako »

thruflo wrote: post #7
3523582908 wrote: post #2

I am extremely, extremely excited about this. I was wondering: what is the difference between VLCN and ElectricSQL? Thank you!

Hey, James here, one of the co-founders of Electric. Both projects are doing active-active CRDT-based sync. Our focus is on sync via Postgres and on compatibility with existing Postgres-backed applications. So you can drop Electric onto an existing Postgres-backed system and it works with your existing data model. There's also quite a lot of difference in the development model, how we handle migrations, shape-based p…

How do you deal with schema migrations, and software updates (SQLite or Postgres)?

Re: Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

#79

Post by thruflo »

hultner wrote: post #73

I have a side project where this would fit perfectly. I’ve for a database in Postgres and my plan have been to sync the data into a local SQLite for a react-native app which needs to work offline and with flaky connections, to then later sync it back into PG. I have never gotten around to actually build the sync and it looks like this could solve that problem. Does this play nice with RLS? I’m running everything on P…

Hey, cool and yup, that's exactly the kind of setup we aim to support and we have drivers for both Expo and React Native.

Re: RLS, not quite, you'll need to port your rules to our DDLX syntax https://electric-sql.com/docs/api/ddlx -- which is not fully implemented yet (we're working on right now, will be available shortly).

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