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advantages of using SQLjs over SQLite native in NodeJS

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#350 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js, sqlite, wasm
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the homepage guidance and the NodeJS example mentioned in the issue, then compare the documented SQL.js and native SQLite usage paths. Done means the project has a clear, evidence-backed explanation of the trade-offs, including file loading and performance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

question

Hi,

Thanks for this project, it's very useful.
I see in the homepage of SQLjs that it's recommended to use SQLite native if using server-side NodeJS code.
However there is an example of using SQLjs with NodeJS.

Comparing the two options, I see several advantages to using SQLjs with NodeJS:

  1. Same database interface, if needing both server-side and client-side database
  2. Easier to test and migrate: can first develop all client-side code and easily move database to server for production uses.
  3. It's easier and faster to use in-memory database with SQLjs. SQLjs can load the database file directly into memory. With SQLite native what I see is that it's possible to make only an empty in-memory database and populate it with SQL commands (which will take time to run).

The only downside I see is that Emscripten code is usually at 50-60% of the performance of native code. So SQLjs is slower (how much?).

Is my reasoning correct?
Especially regarding point #3 - I couldn't find a viable solution to load the file into memory with SQLite native (fast), while SQLjs can easily do this.

Thanks

Dominant language
JavaScript
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