Comment by thruflo
2 years ago
Hey,
James here, one of the co-founders of Electric.
Both projects are doing active-active CRDT-based sync. Our focus is on sync via Postgres and on compatibility with existing Postgres-backed applications. So you can drop Electric onto an existing Postgres-backed system and it works with your existing data model.
There's also quite a lot of difference in the development model, how we handle migrations, shape-based partial replication, etc. And we're not focused on p2p sync -- for us, everything goes through Postgres.
Hope that helps -- you can read a bit more about the system design here: https://electric-sql.com/docs/reference/architecture
Thank you for the help! It is quite useful. Another question while I still have you:
On the clientside, is SQLite running in a separate thread? Or is it running on the main thread? Is this the same or different for an electron app vs running in the browser?
With wa-sqlite in IndexedDB mode we're main thread. In OPFS mode it's a worker thread. With the mobile drivers you go over a native bridge.
With Electron / Tauri it's the same as the browser. You're running in Chromium / native WebView on the front-end side.
How do you deal with schema migrations, and software updates (SQLite or Postgres)?