NAnalgeon·Sep 28, 2021
Thanks! I've always liked the idea of SQL in the browser, since the Web SQL times.
That part is provided by the excellent sql.js project btw: https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js/
In Show HN: SQLite Playgroundsql-js
sql.js
JavaScript2020–2024
sql-js / sql.js
sql.js
A javascript library to run SQLite on the web.
17Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A javascript library to run SQLite on the web.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
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- aergoio/aergolite · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-05-23 18:47:56 UTC to 2024-11-03 17:26:47 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesI recently started looking into the most mature SQL database for the browser. My goal was similar, to be able take data as json or HTTP responses or csv or whatever and be able to pass them through a SQL engine with the user providing custom code/data the whole way.
Turns out the most mature JavaScript database is SQLite ported to webassembly: https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js.
Based on that research, I wrote a bit about running SQL and other languages entirely in the browser here: https://datastation.multiprocess.io/blog/2021-06-16-language...
In Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite databaseWe believe everyone should be able to use and profit from AI, so we spent this year building Hal9, which aspires to become "Roblox for AI".
* What is Hal9?
Roblox is many things: A game development environment with a visual editor that makes it easy to get started but unconstrained to advanced users that want to code. Roblox is also a library of assets, and a marketplace for games.
We are taking a similar approach, we are building a visual editor to assemble anything from simple data analysis by importing data and visualizing it with charts, to data forecasting with regressions, to complex workflows to do web-scraping and run deep learning models like LSTMs.
However, visual editors are constrained and at some point they just don't work, so every block is backed by open source code which you can modify to your hearts' contempt using our co
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de editor.
In addition, you can also add new blocks and share them with others in a library of assets. We are currently using GitHub as a library of open source scripts.
Finally, we have aspirations to help contributors profit from their work by sharing profits with them.
* How are we building this?
We are building everything with web technologies, let me explain why.
First, the whole purpose of this is to make AI more accessible. Technologies like Electron allow us to easily deploy to multiple platforms and avoid having users troubleshoot system dependencies. To put it simply, web technologies allow users to get started with no additional setup.
However, we also see the ecosystem of web technologies converging with Data Science and AI. For instance, the tensorflow.js [1] project allows users to run TensorFlow in the client and optionally train models in GPUs in NodeJS. We currently provide NodeJS infrastructure to run server-side code and hopefully GPUs as well soon.
Another great example is webassembly, which can allow us to run Python with PyIodide [2]; same for SQL with sql.js [3], etc. We are also very excited for WebGPU [4], an initiative to bring proper GPU support to web technologies, which should make it so much easier to use proper GPUs locally.
Momentum is growing around Data Science with libraries like tidy.js [5], danfo.js [6], and ml5.js [7]. Currently this ecosystem is a bit fragmented but we believe they will eventually come together.
Finally, web technologies like CSS and D3.js are arguably the best platform for visualizations. We are big fans of the new ObservableHQ Plot [8] library which we are already using in Hal9.
* Call to action
Head to https://hal9.ai and try it out.
You will need your desktop to interact with the embedded app at the top of our site. The app is diabled on mobile but the site should give you a good idea of how it works.
We are looking for feedback, users and contributors.
If you find this useful, you can download Hal9 for Windows, Mac, or use the Web version and our cloud service for $19.99/month.We are planning to use this revenue to become self-sustained and share profits with our community of developers.
As a developer, you can download and use the development versions to contribute to the open source repo of scripts in https://github.com/hal9ai/hal9ai
* Resources
- Site : https://hal9.ai
- Github : https://github.com/hal9ai
- Twitter : https://twitter.com/hal9ai
- Discord : https://discord.gg/dKYgga84
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jluraschi
* References
[1] https://www.tensorflow.org/js
[2] https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide
[3] https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js/
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/WD-webgpu-20210518/
[5] https://pbeshai.github.io/tidy/
[6] https://danfo.jsdata.org/
[7] https://ml5js.org/
[8] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot
SQLite has been ported to JS (and wasm) for some time,
https://sql.js.org/#/
https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js/
In WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in the browserPostgres is better in the I-need-concurrency case -- I think it's the greatest RDBMS that's ever been made and would like someone to prove me wrong some day.
SQLite's amazing too though, when you don't need concurrency (and most websites don't really -- especially the ones that should be scaling vertically instead of horizontally).
Anyway here's some cool SQLite stuff:
- https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/dqlite
- https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite
- https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
- https://www.sqlite.org/rtree.html
- https://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher
- https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream
- https://github.com/aergoio/aergolite
- https://sqlite.org/lang_with.html#rcex3
- https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js
- https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index
- https://github.com/h3rald/litestore
- https://github.com/adamlou
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For my current personal project I'm having a lot of fun playing with client-side Sqlite[1] via WASM. It's great for situations where you have a set of relational data which you want to query and sift and display on the page in various ways, yet you know users won't need to add to, or alter, that data set.
[1] - sql.js - https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js/
In Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?With no sense of overstatement here, SQLite is one of my favorite creations in the entire world, so I have a bunch of links some of you might find interesting if you want to dig further:
https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js - SQL.js lets you run SQLite within a Web page as it's just SQLite compiled to JS with Emscripten.
https://litestream.io/blog/why-i-built-litestream/ - Litestream is a SQLite-powered streaming replication system.
https://sqlite.org/lang_with.html#rcex3 - you can do graph-style queries against SQLite too (briefly mentioned in the article).
https://github.com/aergoio/aergolite - AergoLite is replicated SQLite but secured by a blockchain.
https://github.com/simonw/datasette - Datasette (mentioned at the very end of the OP article) is a tool for offering up an SQLite database as a Web accessible service - you can do queries, d
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ata analysis, etc. on top of it. I believe Simon, the creator, frequents HN too and is a true SQLite power user :-)
https://dogsheep.github.io/ - Dogsheep is a whole roster of tools for doing personal analytics (e.g. analyzing your GitHub or Twitter use, say) using SQLite and Datasette.
Using SQLite compiled to Wasm in order to push computation closer to the user is a powerful idea. I'm partial to the method of serving up the SQLite files directly and building applications around the SQL.js library [1], which includes math extensions and the ability to embed Javascript udfs. I wrote a data visualization using SQLite as the data store [2] and can attest that it's refreshing to use SQL inside of a static website.
[1] https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js
[2] https://ml-ranking.geospiza.me
In Serverless SQLite