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Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

pocketbase.io

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Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#201

I've been trying out Pocketbase on a side project idea. I'm super impressed! Having worked for many years on Django projects, Pocketbase seems like a perfect fit for those small to medium sized projects for which you don't want to create and maintain a traditional backend for. Happy to answer any questions.

is it suitable to maintain internal company KB? small size 15-20 people tech team

It's meant to build apps with. If you want to build a knowledge base, sure. But why would you build a Knowledge Base when you can use Confluence, Notion, https://www.getoutline.com/, https://clickup.com/, etc that already exist? There's free self-hosted ones too.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if my question is misguided: did you try SQLite3's native online backup API? I would not use raw file access knowing they have that.

I'm aware of it but was wanted to create something that I can just quickly point at a running system and make a backup. This is a narrower use case and I accept that it's not for everyone.

I understand but in this case the quicker solution has potentially fatal flaws.

With time I have learned to speed-run less things because I've been bitten by the quick and dirty solution probably at least 100 times.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#204

Postbase uses PostgreSQL and BetterAuth. No GUI yet, but it's in the plan and will be called Admin (Panel). I had the same instinct of using SQLite, but then, after a bit of research, PostgreSQL seemed a better alternative for serious projects.

Looks very cool! Good luck!

Thank you

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't get any argument here. PocketBase's is very polished and friendly. I fell back onto a popular pre-existing UI component system called shadcn (which does look a bit like bootstrap), not only because you gotta start somewhere but also because I'm not the caliber of UX designer Gani is :bow:. If you have the time, I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve. I'm a bit surprised on the mobile comment, sin…

> Could you elaborate? - thanks The part that prompted my comment was clicking to edit a row on mobile in vertical orientation. Rather than fill the screen the edit shows up in a modal which doesn't really make sense, since you have so little horizontal space to work with. And the inputs are cut off slightly due to no padding. And the whole admin UI overfills my (pro max) iPhone when held vertically, I think due to t…

Thank you! This is great feedback. Much appreciated.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks this is very helpful, can you please look at the code more, specially around inserts and reads why its so slow? I am a lowly frontend developer who got into the SQLite hype due to twitter and DHH from Rails, didn't know how bad SQLite was.

I've just started with go a few weeks ago, so take my info with a grain of salt. Pocketbase uses a mutex for all the data reads and writes. That means that every write will block any readers for the write duration. If you do a lot of writes this will become quite inefficient quickly. You need some kinds of locking to write data, but if badly implemented it will pretty much roll back all concurrency advantages, you pi…

(Similar disclaimer: I'm not an expert on PocketBase implementation details)

I don't think the referenced `Store` is used in the SQLite access path and PocketBase uses SQLite in WAL mode. Besides, in cases where the `Store` is used, it uses a read/write lock to allow for concurrent reads.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with Pocketbase but the limitation around not supporting NULLABLE columns despite being based on SQLITE was starting to become a bit of a liability, so I switched to Trailbase a little while ago.

Ho do you find Trailbase compares? Worth the switch?

Switching DBs is very invasive. Switching your application base even more so. As long as you're happy happy with PocketBase and there's nothing you're critically missing, the answer will almost certainly be: no. Is there anything you're looking for?

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nothing a skilled dev can't work around. Agreed. Loved this FAQ notice: "If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!"

[flagged]

That’s a nice $10 word to say that it offends AI slop-generating fee fees.

Cool

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally the lack of a decimal type make SQLite a no-go for me. Its too much of a hassle to do financial operations completely on the application side.

Do you only build stuff that performs financial operations? I'm not sure why sqlite being suboptimal for this one very specific use-case means that sqlite as a whole is a no-go for you.

No, not at all actually. But I had a lot of applications where at somepoint we needed to add storage of currency in the database. It became relevant for billing or other features. This without the app itself being financial in nature.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#210
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yap, not famous enough to train AI on it

It’s getting better on Claude specifically now that training cutoffs are starting to move beyond the end of 2023. OpenAI models are a little less likely to trip up as long as you keep reminding it that it needs to account for v0.23+

I've found Gemini 2.5 pro to handle it ok. It forgets small things like using the deprecated model instead of baseModel and things like that, but nothing dramatic.
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