FAQ

How is TrailBase different from PocketBase, SupaBase or other application bases?

Naturally there’s a lot of overlap but let’s start by saying that we’re also huge fans of SupaBase and PocketBase. The former is incredibly versatile, while the latter is incredibly easy and cheap to use. As far as we can tell, PocketBase pioneered the notion of a single-file, SQLite-based, FireBase-like server.

TrailBase is an attempt at combining the flexibility and principled architecture of SupaBase with the ease and low-overhead of PocketBase. We owe a great debt of gratitude to both ❤️.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: other more established solutions are more polished, may have more extensive feature sets in many areas, and have seen a lot more mileage. TrailBase is committed to catch up and challenge the status quo following our principles and in many ways, TrailBase is already incredibly easy to deploy and blazingly fast.

We also offer some slightly more detailed comparisons to both PocketBase and SupaBase.

Is TrailBase ready for production use?

TrailBase has not seen a lot of mileage yet and there’s probably plenty of sharp edges, which will take some time to smooth over. That said, it’s also incredibly simple, easy to get on, and easy to get off. We’re welcoming any brave soul who would like to be an early adopter. If you’re curious and patient, we’re ready to help you get off the ground in return for your honest feedback 🙏. You can take a look at the preliminary productionization.

Scale, performance and reliability

As my product grows, will TrailBase scale with me or will I hit a wall? Firstly, congratulations! The “success”-problem is a great problem to have 🎉.

Short, hand-wavy answer: you’ll face all the same issues as with other solutions but you probably will be fine 😶‍🌫️ .

Long answer: TrailBase currently only scales vertically, however it’s incredibly fast. Besides, there’s an inherent beauty to vertical scaling ¹ and modern servers can get you very very far. You can absolutely support tens of thousands or even hundreds thousands of concurrent users with a single database. With TrailBase simple deployment, it may also be an option to shard your users or tenants across multiple databases. In the future, TrailBase would also like to support multi-database setups out-of-the-box to further improve concurrency.

Keep in mind that other databases, like MySQL or Postgres, aren’t a silver bullet either. If you’re reaching massive levels of scale, more specialized solutions will become more and more attractive such as non-relational document stores, columnar OLAP stores for analytic workloads, …

TrailBase explicitly tries to avoid tight coupling locking you in. At the end of the day, you’re using very plain SQLite, letting you adopt and drop TrailBase when it makes sense. Similarly, the stateless auth flow makes it easy to split out your logic and data while continuing to use TrailBase.

Besides pure scale and performance, many more horizontal solutions provide additional benefits such as disaster-recovery/fail-over or improved edge read latency. Fortunately, both can be achieved with SQLite as well using solutions like LiteStream keeping eventually consistent copies of your data.

Can we add Features to TrailBase?

Yes! First take a look at our coarse roadmap, maybe we’re already working on it? Otherwise, don’t hesitate, just open an issue and ask away. We love to hear your thoughts. Contributions are also very welcome, let’s just talk upfront to avoid any surprises. Especially, in the early days we’ll have to see how “things” fit into the roadmap. For example, having a dark mode for the dashboard would be nice but it’s also extra work to maintain while the dashboard is still rapidly changing, so it becomes a question of when.

Data Import & Export

Few requirements: STRICT table and an auto-incrementing primary key for collections but the dashboard will work for any table, view, etc. You can simply import and export data with standard SQLite tooling, e.g.:

sqlite3 main.db < import.sql

Also check out the getting started guide.

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Footnotes

1. Adopting more complex multi-tiered database solutions comes with its own challenges for operations, testing, and developer setups. ↩