Off topic I guess, but I've been thinking about a collaborative spreadsheet that uses something like Sqlite over LiteFS. Where each spreadsheet is just a sqlite file. Not sure what the architecture would look like though. Ideally the main server would just keep the files in sync, perhaps with some way to update each user without having to send the whole file. This has the advantage of programabilty and a familiar UI. All at just the cost of hosting the file and a webserver.

you will find that maintaining schema consistency during migrations will be more trouble than its worth

Hey thanks for your reply. Can you expound on what the issue would be? What do you mean by migrations?

Let’s say you have a hundred databases and you want to do a schema migration. You could naively do all of them at once, but what if they take a long time, or if one fails? What then?

So you implement some thing to do rollbacks and retries. Now you’ve created a complicated monstrosity because you will have users dealing with potentially different databases with different schemas.

You were better off with a single database with a sharding key.

Hmmm thanks for the reply. Would that be true even if the database is just a single table each? In my mind I shouldn't need to do any schema migrations because I'm really just a file server and a UI. But I guess with adding more tables (akin to sheets in excel world) I would need to keep that in mind.

I may try this when I get some free time, thanks for the feedback!

The problem appears less when creating new tables, creating tables is relatively safe. But let's say in your one table per db you keep track of a few things (columns). For example you have a column for the name of the sheet and another column for the time it was created and some other miscellaneous columns. Later on once you have a hundred users or so you get a persistent feature request: keep track of the time it was last updated. You write up a simple migration, it looks something like

  ALTER TABLE your_table ADD updated_at TEXT;

That said I do really like your idea, I've gotten into sqlite a lot lately (I work on the database team at Fly.io), I'm just responding to you questions specifically about migrations.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I was thinking of a more hands-of approach in terms of what I do vs what the user does. So in terms of this feature request, it would actually be implemented client side. That is, I would update the client to ask the user if they want this new feature, then use IF EXISTS to see if the table already exists, and if it does, tell the user to fix it themselves. Or could we keep all the metadata in a seperate table and JOIN it on the ID? In any event, I'm literally just a reliable file server and a UI in this equation (plus backups).

For context, this would really be aimed at developers and admins to manage data for their clients or co-workers. Stuff that currently is an excel sheet, but needs to leave excel world to do some mundane task, such as filling a pdf and uplading it somewhere. You could do this is word mailmerge + excel, but now you (the admin) are in charge of performing this mundane task every week. And belive me this kind of thing is very common. In fact, the one special thing I may do is somehow write the data into an excel file and somehow allow them to sync to each other (not the logic part from either side though).

Not even sure if I would try to sell or just make it for free. It wouldn't be something streamlined like airtable, although if it got interest maybe I would take your approach.

If you like my idea btw, feel free to use it! I have nothing but respect for fly.io, I used it breifly for a side project and it was realy simple to set up. You saying you like my idea actually gives me confidence in trying it out, thank you!