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IndexedDB vs SQLite: What are the differences?

SQLite and IndexedDB are two popular databases used in web development. Let's explore the key difference between them.

  1. Storage Mechanism: SQLite is a serverless and file-based database that stores data in a single file on the file system. On the other hand, IndexedDB is an in-built database provided by web browsers that stores data in a structured manner within the browser itself.

  2. Data Formats: SQLite mainly supports structured data in the form of tables, much like traditional relational databases. IndexedDB, on the other hand, stores data as key-value pairs in a NoSQL format, allowing for flexible and schema-less data storage.

  3. Query Language: SQLite uses SQL (Structured Query Language) for querying and manipulating data. It provides a wide range of SQL statements for data retrieval and modification. In contrast, IndexedDB uses JavaScript API methods for data retrieval and manipulation. It requires writing custom code using these methods to perform database operations.

  4. Indexed Searching: SQLite provides built-in support for creating indexes on tables, which enhances query performance for filtering and searching data. IndexedDB, as the name suggests, also supports indexing, but it requires explicitly defining and maintaining indexes for efficient data retrieval.

  5. Browser Compatibility: SQLite can be used in various programming languages and frameworks beyond web development, such as desktop and mobile applications. IndexedDB, on the other hand, is specific to web browsers and is not available for use outside of the browser environment.

  6. Transaction Management: SQLite uses ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties for data integrity and supports transactions. It allows multiple concurrent connections to the database. On the other hand, IndexedDB also supports transactions but follows a different transaction model based on event-based callbacks.

In summary, SQLite is a serverless, file-based database that stores structured data in tables using SQL, while IndexedDB is an in-built database provided by web browsers that stores data as key-value pairs in a NoSQL format, using JavaScript API methods for data manipulation. SQLite supports indexing, has wide programming language compatibility, and uses a transaction-based model, whereas IndexedDB is specific to web browsers, requires explicitly defining indexes, and uses an event-based callback transaction model.

Advice on IndexedDB and SQLite
Needs advice
on
IndexedDBIndexedDBMongoDBMongoDB
and
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL

I'm currently developing an app that ranks trending stuff ( such as games, memes or movies, etc. ) or events in a particular country or region. Here are the specs: My app does not require registration and requires cookies and localStorage to track users. Users can add new entries to each trending category provided that their country of origin is recorded in cookies. If each category contains more than 100 items then the oldest items get deleted. The question is: what kind of database should I use for managing this app? Thanks in advance

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
MongoDBMongoDB

I think your best and cheapest choice is going to be MongoDB, Although Postgres is probably going to be the more scaleable approach, you likely have a good idea of how you want to present your data, and the app seems small enough that you shouldn't need to worry about scaling issues. It also sounds like your app can grow in a linear capacity based on the number of users, and the amount of data, which is the perfect use-case for noSQL databases (linear, predictable scaling).

Correct me if I have any of these assumptions wrong. 1. You're looking to have a relatively high-read with a lower write volume 2. Your app is essentially a list of objects that can belong to a category 3. users can create objects in this list.

I think Mongo is going to be what you're looking for on the following basis: 1. you absolutely need a database that is shared by all users of your app, therefor IndexedDB is out of the question. 2. You have semi-structured data 3. you probably want the cheapest solution.

I think Postgres is wrong for the following reasons: 1. your app is pretty simple in concept, SQL databases will add unnecessary complexity to your system, either through ORMs or SQL queries. (use an ORM if you go with SQL) 2. Hosting SQL databases for production is not cheap! the cheapest solution I know of for Postgres is ElephantSQL. It provides 20MB for free with 5 concurrent connections, you should be okay to manage these limitations if you decide to go Postgres in the end. Whereas mongoDB Atlas has some great free-tier options.

Although your data might be easier to model in Postgres, you can certainly model your data as a single list of items that have a category attached.

I don't want to officially recommend another tool, but you should really checkout prisma, firebase, amplify, or Azure App Services for this app! Just go completely backend-less [Firebase] https://firebase.google.com/ [Amplify] https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/ [Prisma] https://www.prisma.io/ [Azure App Services] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/?v=18.51

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Needs advice
on
FirebaseFirebaseMySQLMySQL
and
SQLiteSQLite

Hi everyone! I am a high school student, starting a massive project. I'm building a system for a boarding school to be better connected to their students and be more efficient with information. In the meantime, I am developing a website and an android app. What's the best datastore I can use? I need to be able to access student data on the app from the main database and send push notifications. Also feed updates. What's the best approach? What's the best tool I can use to deploy the website and the database? One for testing and prototyping, and an official one... Thanks in advance!!!!

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Replies (3)
Ahmed AlAskalany
Android Developer at Kitab Sawti · | 5 upvotes · 303.6K views
Recommends
on
FirebaseFirebase

Firebase has Android, iOS, and Web SDKs; and a console where you can develop, manage, and monitor all the data and analytics from one place. Firebase real-time database is good for online presence and instant feed updates, while Firebase Firestone is good for user profile and other relational data records. Firebase has a UI SDK which makes it easy to interface with the resources in the project, and with tons of tutorials and starter projects it should be easy to quickly have a decent prototype to iterate upon. Since you said Massive, use their pricing calculator to figure if your expected scale will be covered by the free quota or if you go for the pay-as-you-go that the price is reasonable for your project.

Good luck with the project!

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Paul Whittemore
Developer and Owner at Appurist Software · | 4 upvotes · 303.7K views
Recommends
on
FirebaseFirebase

It sounds like a server-client relationship (central database) and while SQLite is probably the simplest, note that its performance is probably the worst of the top 20 or so choices you have. It is different from Firebase and MySQL (and most other databases) in that it is embedded in the product, although it could be embedded in your server itself.

MySQL would require a separate MySQL db server, which means either two servers (one for MySQL, and one to provide your specific services to your client app) or both running on a single server machine. There are many alternatives in the same category as MySQL, and a choice of relational databases or document (NoSQL) databases. But architecturally, they are in the same category as MySQL, a separate db server that your application server would get its data from.

Firebase is different yet again, in that it is a service that is already hosted by a company, providing many integrated features such as authentication and storage of user account info. However it does take care of many of the concerns with running a server, such as performance, scalability and management. There are some negatives that you should be aware of though: any investment of time and coding with Firebase is pretty much non-portable, in that you are stuck with Firebase going forward. If you needed to switch to a different service, not only would it be a different API, but it would be a different architecture and much of your coding would need to be discarded. Second, it's owned and run by Google now, so you have a large corporation backing it, but that also means they could decide to discontinue it without any real effect on the Google bottom line. Also some folks would have concerns with storing data on Google servers. That said, I think if you are aware of these in advance, and especially if you are a high school student, that Firebase is a fairly easy winner here. The server is already set up for you, the documentation is very complete and rich, with lots of examples, and Google is not going away. The main concern would be if it really is massive, there could be a rising cost to the service. I suspect though that it is not massive, even if everyone in a school used it. The number of concurrent connections would not be huge (probably not even into the hundreds, even if there are thousands of users).

I'd go with Firebase even though you will need to learn their API, because you'll need to learn something one way or another. SQLite is a bit of a toy database, and MySQL is a real one but you (or someone) would need to manage that server on top of needing to develop the server and client app. With Firebase, much of the server already exists, including a professionally hosted database. There are tons of high-level features provided and initial cost is somewhere between very low and zero.

Part of this is dependent on what language you want to write this in. Javascript for a cross-platform client app (I'd use Vue.js + Vuetify for UI, and provide it as a web app and optionally wrap that with Electron for a desktop app, Apache Cordova for mobile). Server could be Javascript with an Express-based REST API on Node.js, talking to Firebase for services.

If you were a Java developer though, all this goes out the window and I'd recommend a simple Java server with Javalin for REST API, and embedded ObjectDB for database storage (combined into one server). ObjectDB is very very fast and can be separated out into a scalable server if this became truly massive. But you would probably never need to go that far.

All of this is a lot of work. I hope this isn't for something like an assignment. It is in the order of 6 months of work if you know what you're doing, all year if you're learning as you go.

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Michael Maraist
Chief Architect at Pixia Corp · | 2 upvotes · 303.1K views
Recommends
on
RocksDBRocksDB

Don't think you can go wrong with MySQL or postgresql. python+postgres is VERY well supported stack and can do almost anything. Great visualization and administrative tools for both. There are some data-mismatch problems, however.. node.js/python with mongodb is a bit more modern and makes it trivial to "serialize" data with sprinklings of indexes. If you're using go-lang, then RocksDB is a great high-performance data-modeling base (it's not relational how-ever) It's more like a building-block for key-value store. But it's ACID so you CAN build relational systems on top. I've used LevelDB for other projects (Java/C) (similar architecture and works great on android - chrome uses it for it's metadata-storage). Rock/Level can achieve multi-million writes on cheap hardware thanks to it's trade-offs.

I'm very familiar with SQLite.. Personally my least favorite, but it's the most portable database format, and it does support ACID.. I have many gripes, but biggest issue is parallel access (you really need a single process/thread to own the data-model, then use IPC to communicate with your process/thread).. (same could be said for LevelDB, but that's so efficient, it's almost never an issue).

If your'e using Java, then JavaDB/DerbyDB/HSQLDB are EXCELLENT systems.. highly multi-threaded, good stand-alone tools. (embedded or TCP-connected). Perfect for unit-tests. Can use simple dumb portable formats (e.g. text-file containing only inserts) all the way to classic journaled binary B-tree formats to pure-in-memory. Java has a lot of overhead, so this is only really viable if you're already using Java in your project.

For high performance "memsql" is mysql API to a hybrid in-memory index + on-disk column-database (feels like classic SQL to you though). Falls into the mysql-swiss-army-knife tool-kit.

Similarly with in-memory there is "redis".. Absolutely a joy to work with. It too is a specialty swiss army knife. Steer clear of redis for primary data that you can't lose.. while redis does support persisting data, it isn't very efficient and will become the bottleneck. redis is great for micro-queue's, topics, stat-aggregators, message-repositories (password-management systems, where writes are rare so persistance is viable). Plus I love that redis uses a pure-text protocol so I can netcat or telnet directly into it and do stuff.

I've loved cloud-data-stores.. Amazon "DynamoDB" or Google BigTable are awesome!!! Cheap compared to normal hosting fees of an AWS EC2 instance.. You can play all day.. put a terabyte up, then blow it away.. pay for what you play with. It's a very very different data-model though.. They give you a very very few set of tricks that let you do complex data-modeling - and you have to be clever and have enough foresight to not block yourself into a hole (or have customer abuse expensive queries).

Then there's Cassandra/Hadoop (HBase). These are petabyte scale databases (technically so is Dynamo/BigTable). They're incredibly efficient at what they do. And they have a lot of plugins to do almost anything you need. I personally love these the best (and RocksDB/LevelDB are like their infant children offspring). You can run these on your laptop (unlike Amazon/Google engines above). But their discipline is very different than all the other's above.

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Pros of IndexedDB
Pros of SQLite
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 162
      Lightweight
    • 135
      Portable
    • 121
      Simple
    • 80
      Sql
    • 28
      Preinstalled on iOS and Android
    • 2
      Tcl integration
    • 1
      Free
    • 1
      Portable A database on my USB 'love it'

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of IndexedDB
    Cons of SQLite
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 2
        Not for multi-process of multithreaded apps
      • 1
        Needs different binaries for each platform

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is IndexedDB?

      This API uses indexes to enable high-performance searches of this data. While Web Storage is useful for storing smaller amounts of data, it is less useful for storing larger amounts of structured data.

      What is SQLite?

      SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

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      What companies use IndexedDB?
      What companies use SQLite?
      See which teams inside your own company are using IndexedDB or SQLite.
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      What tools integrate with IndexedDB?
      What tools integrate with SQLite?

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      What are some alternatives to IndexedDB and SQLite?
      Pouchdb
      PouchDB enables applications to store data locally while offline, then synchronize it with CouchDB and compatible servers when the application is back online, keeping the user's data in sync no matter where they next login.
      MongoDB
      MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
      Redis
      Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
      CouchDB
      Apache CouchDB is a database that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce indexes, and regular HTTP for its API. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents and query your indexes with your web browser, via HTTP. Index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript.
      MySQL
      The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
      See all alternatives