Re: [WebSQL] Any future plans, or has IndexedDB replaced WebSQL?

[Mikeal Rogers]

i've mostly stayed out of this thread because i felt like i'd just being fanning the flames but i really can't stay out anymore.

databases are more that SQL, always have been.

SQL is a DSL for relational database access. all implementations of SQL have a similar set of tools they implement first and layer SQL on top of. those tools tend to be a storage engine, btree, and some kind of transactional model between them. under the ugly covers, most databases look like berkeleydb and the layer you live in is just sugar on top.

creating an in-browser specification/implementation on top of a given relational/SQL story is a terrible idea. it's unnecessarily limiting to a higher level api and can't be easily extended the way a simple set of tools like IndexedDB can.

suggesting that other databases be implemented on top of SQL rather than on top of the tools in which SQL is built is just backwards to anyone who's built a database.

it's not very hard to write the abstraction you're talking about on top of IndexedDB, and until you do it i'm going to have a hard time taking you seriously because it's clearly doable.

i implemented a CouchDB compatible datastore on top of IndexedDB, it took me less than a week at a time when there was only one implementation that was still changing and still had bugs. it would be much easier now.

https://github.com/mikeal/idbcouch

it needs to be updated to use the latest version of the spec which is a day of work i just haven't gotten to yet.

the constructs in IndexedDB are pretty low level but sufficient if you know how to implement databases. performance is definitely an issue, but making these constructs faster would be much easier than trying to tweak an off the shelf SQL implementation to your use case.