PowerSync Update: August 2024

August has been our busiest month yet, with all-time highs for the number of developers actively building with PowerSync — for both PowerSync Cloud and our self-hosted version, PowerSync Open Edition. We’ve been hard at work too — here’s what went down this past month:

JS/Web SDK: Performance Improvements for Large Datasets

Improved handling of update notifications on the JS/Web SDK has led to significant performance improvements: tests show a 20-25X improvement in initial download times for large datasets.

See the pull request

JS/Web: Log Queries on the Performance Timeline

Enabling the [.inline-code-snippet]debugMode[.inline-code-snippet] flag in the JavaScript Web SDK logs all SQL queries on the Performance timeline in Chrome's Developer Tools (after recording). This can help identify slow-running queries.

This includes:

PowerSync queries from client code.
Internal statements from PowerSync, including queries saving sync data, and [.inline-code-snippet]begin[.inline-code-snippet]/[.inline-code-snippet]commit[.inline-code-snippet] statements.

Read the docs

Easily Use the Diagnostics App With a Local Development Setup

A Test Client is available as part of the [.inline-code-snippet]powersync-service[.inline-code-snippet] repo, and now contains a script to generate a JWT from a given powersync.yaml config file – similar to generating development tokens from the Dashboard for PowerSync Cloud instances. This token can then be used to e.g. sign into the Diagnostics app with a self-hosted setup.

Available via the command:

[.inline-code-snippet]node dist/bin.js generate-token --config path/to/powersync.yaml[.inline-code-snippet]

Shout out to the folks at XOi who spurred us on here.

View the Test Client in the repo

ElectricSQL electric-next vs PowerSync

On July 17th 2024, ElectricSQL announced a “clean rebuild” of their product, which is being called ‘electric-next’. They also announced that they’ve stopped development on the legacy ElectricSQL, as it’s being superseded by electric-next.

In this post we compare their new direction to PowerSync.

Read the article

Flutter: New Demo Project for Using Drift ORM with PowerSync and Supabase

This demo app is an extension of the Supabase Todo List App and showcases how to set up and use the [.inline-code-snippet]drift_sqlite_async[.inline-code-snippet] library (an integration with Drift ORM) with PowerSync.

Explore the project

JS/Web & RN: Most Polyfills Now Pre-Bundled

We’ve simplified the installation process for our React Native and JS/web SDKs by pre-bundling all polyfills that could support this.

Thanks to @frankcalise, @tommy and everyone else who shared their feedback on this!

See the pull request

JS/Web & RN: WebSocket Streaming Now the Default Connection Method

WebSocket streaming is the recommended connection method and was made the default in versions 1.6.0 of our JS/Web SDK and 1.11.0 of our React Native SDK.

WebSocket streaming is more robust against network inspectors on RN and can support new capabilities such as BLOB column types. Sync speeds also appear faster with using WebSocket on RN, but we're still working on benchmarks.

HTTP streaming remains available as a connection method.

See the docs for JS/Web and RN

Flutter: Streamlined Client SDK Web Support

For Flutter Web, downloading the required [.inline-code-snippet]sqlite3.wasm[.inline-code-snippet] and [.inline-code-snippet]powersync_db.worker.js[.inline-code-snippet] files is no longer a manual step. Simply run: [.inline-code-snippet]dart run powersync:setup_web[.inline-code-snippet].

See the Dart package README