Hey HN, I built this. Honker adds cross-process NOTIFY/LISTEN to SQLite. You get push-style event delivery with single-digit millisecond latency without a damon/broker, using your existing SQLite file. A lot of pretty high-traffic applications are just Framework+SQLite+Litestream on a VPS now, so I wanted to bring a sixer to the "just use SQLite" party.
SQLite doesn't run a server like Postgres, so the trick is moving the polling source from interval queries on a SQLite connection to a lightweight stat(2) on the WAL file. Many small queries are efficient in SQLite (https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html) so this isn't really a huge upgrade, but the cross-language result is pretty interesting to me - this is language agnostic as all you do is listen to the WAL file and call SQLite functions.
On top of the store/notify primitives, honker ships ephemeral pub/sub (like pg_notify), durable work queues with retries and dead-letter (like pg-boss/Oban), and event streams with per-consumer offsets. All three are rows in your app's existing .db file and can commit atomically with your business write. This is cool because a rollback drops both.
This used to be called litenotify/joblite but I bought honker.dev as a joke for my gf and I realized that every mq/task/worker have silly names: Oban, pg-boss, Huey, RabbitMQ, Celery, Sidekiq, etc. Thus a silly goose got its name.
Honker waddles the same path as these giants and honks into the same void.
Hopefully it's either useful to you or is amusing. Standard alpha software warnings apply.
Is the main use case for this for languages that only have access to process based concurrency?
Struggling to see why you would otherwise need this in java/go/clojure/C# your sqlite has a single writer, so you can notify all threads that care about inserts/updates/changes as your application manages the single writer (with a language level concurrent queue) so you know when it's writing and what it has just written. So it always felt simpler/cleaner to get notification semantics that way.
Still fun to see people abuse WAL in creative ways. Cool to see a notify mechanism that works for languages that only have process based concurrency python/JS/TS/ruby. Nice work!
This is really interesting. I'm building something on Postgresql with LISTEN/NOTIFY and Postgraphile. I'd love to (in theory) be able to have a swappable backend and not be so tightly coupled to the database server.
Nice, I had no idea that stat() every 1 ms is so affordable. Aparently it takes less than 1 μs per call on my hardware, so that's less than 0.1% cpu time for polling.
"Syscalls are slow" is only mostly true. They are slower than not having to cross the userspace <-> OS barrier at all, but they're not "slow" like cross-ocean network calls can be. For example, non-VDSO syscalls in linux are about 250 nanoseconds (see for example https://arkanis.de/weblog/2017-01-05-measurements-of-system-...), VDSO syscalls are roughly 10x faster. Slower than userspace function calls for sure, but more than affordable outside the hottest of loops.
Would it help if subscriber states were also stored? (read position, queue name, filters, etc) Then instead of waking all subscription threads to do their own N=1 SELECT when stat(2) changes, the polling thread could do Events INNER JOIN Subscribers and only wake the subscribers that match.
Wouldn't processes on same machine be able to use different IPCs that don't even touch file ? It's neat but I have feeling in vast majority of cases just passing address to one of the IPC methods would be faster and then SQLite itself would only be needed for the durable parts.
This extension piggyback SQLite native transactions. For example, queueing data will be rolled back if transaction is rolled back due to some constrains violations.
It is possible to achieve with external IPC, but require a lot of very careful programming.
kqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty thing to chase. stat polling looks gross but it's the only thing that actually works everywhere.
What happens on WAL checkpoint? When the file shrinks back, does that trigger a wakeup, or does the poller filter size drops?
Interesting project. Clean idea and nice abstraction layer. Curious how you handle durability and concurrency under load, especially with SQLite as the base.
Hey HN, I built this. Honker adds cross-process NOTIFY/LISTEN to SQLite. You get push-style event delivery with single-digit millisecond latency without a damon/broker, using your existing SQLite file. A lot of pretty high-traffic applications are just Framework+SQLite+Litestream on a VPS now, so I wanted to bring a sixer to the "just use SQLite" party.
SQLite doesn't run a server like Postgres, so the trick is moving the polling source from interval queries on a SQLite connection to a lightweight stat(2) on the WAL file. Many small queries are efficient in SQLite (https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html) so this isn't really a huge upgrade, but the cross-language result is pretty interesting to me - this is language agnostic as all you do is listen to the WAL file and call SQLite functions.
On top of the store/notify primitives, honker ships ephemeral pub/sub (like pg_notify), durable work queues with retries and dead-letter (like pg-boss/Oban), and event streams with per-consumer offsets. All three are rows in your app's existing .db file and can commit atomically with your business write. This is cool because a rollback drops both.
This used to be called litenotify/joblite but I bought honker.dev as a joke for my gf and I realized that every mq/task/worker have silly names: Oban, pg-boss, Huey, RabbitMQ, Celery, Sidekiq, etc. Thus a silly goose got its name.
Honker waddles the same path as these giants and honks into the same void.
Hopefully it's either useful to you or is amusing. Standard alpha software warnings apply.
Is the main use case for this for languages that only have access to process based concurrency?
Struggling to see why you would otherwise need this in java/go/clojure/C# your sqlite has a single writer, so you can notify all threads that care about inserts/updates/changes as your application manages the single writer (with a language level concurrent queue) so you know when it's writing and what it has just written. So it always felt simpler/cleaner to get notification semantics that way.
Still fun to see people abuse WAL in creative ways. Cool to see a notify mechanism that works for languages that only have process based concurrency python/JS/TS/ruby. Nice work!
He mentions Litestream, maybe this also works for litestream read-only replicas which may be in completely different locations?
This is really interesting. I'm building something on Postgresql with LISTEN/NOTIFY and Postgraphile. I'd love to (in theory) be able to have a swappable backend and not be so tightly coupled to the database server.
Nice, I had no idea that stat() every 1 ms is so affordable. Aparently it takes less than 1 μs per call on my hardware, so that's less than 0.1% cpu time for polling.
"Syscalls are slow" is only mostly true. They are slower than not having to cross the userspace <-> OS barrier at all, but they're not "slow" like cross-ocean network calls can be. For example, non-VDSO syscalls in linux are about 250 nanoseconds (see for example https://arkanis.de/weblog/2017-01-05-measurements-of-system-...), VDSO syscalls are roughly 10x faster. Slower than userspace function calls for sure, but more than affordable outside the hottest of loops.
Neat idea!
Would it help if subscriber states were also stored? (read position, queue name, filters, etc) Then instead of waking all subscription threads to do their own N=1 SELECT when stat(2) changes, the polling thread could do Events INNER JOIN Subscribers and only wake the subscribers that match.
I love the name!
Couldn't you use inotify (and/or some cross-platform wrapper) to watch for WAL changes without polling?
Wouldn't processes on same machine be able to use different IPCs that don't even touch file ? It's neat but I have feeling in vast majority of cases just passing address to one of the IPC methods would be faster and then SQLite itself would only be needed for the durable parts.
This extension piggyback SQLite native transactions. For example, queueing data will be rolled back if transaction is rolled back due to some constrains violations.
It is possible to achieve with external IPC, but require a lot of very careful programming.
kqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty thing to chase. stat polling looks gross but it's the only thing that actually works everywhere.
What happens on WAL checkpoint? When the file shrinks back, does that trigger a wakeup, or does the poller filter size drops?
Interesting project. Clean idea and nice abstraction layer. Curious how you handle durability and concurrency under load, especially with SQLite as the base.