Comment by Humphrey
11 hours ago
I've been trying out Pocketbase on a side project idea. I'm super impressed!
Having worked for many years on Django projects, Pocketbase seems like a perfect fit for those small to medium sized projects for which you don't want to create and maintain a traditional backend for.
Happy to answer any questions.
Django has great GIS integration. How does Pocketbase compare here ? Also, can Pocketbase work with PostgreSQL or is it SQLite only ?
SQLite only. I haven't come across any GIS integration. I think you should choose Pocketbase when it "not having features" and being lightweight is the feature you need.
Like Postgres has PostGIS, SQLite has Spatialite. https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index
Unsure about integrating it with Pocketbase but I imagine it is reasonable to do.
How easily can I migrate from an existing sqlite-based backend?
I haven't tried this... but Pocketbase is opinionated in how it's schema is structured - and it needs to be the tool managing your schema.
Therefore if it was me, I would use the Admin UI to create a new db with a similar data structure, and then use a third-party tool to select data and insert into the new database.
I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.
Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?
From the top of https://pocketbase.io/faq/
> If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!
It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality and changes frequently, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.
I tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb work for you.
Not with Pocketbase - as I haven't found I've needed to look into the docs too much. But I have come across a whole bunch of areas LLM's seem to always answer incorrectly for. For example, ChatGPT has almost never corrected told me how to use the UI in Davinci Resolve.
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