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Cloudflare Enhances Performance for Serverless Database D1

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Cloudflare recently announced a revamp of its serverless relational database D1. Built on top of SQLite, D1 has a new architecture that provides better read and write performances and support for JSON functions.

Announced in alpha a year ago and designed to integrate with Workers, the serverless relational database went through different iterations, with the latest announcement primarily focusing on a new architecture and its performance benefits. Matt Silverlock, director of product at Cloudflare, and Glen Maddern, systems engineer at Cloudflare, write:

If you’ve used D1 in its alpha state to date: forget everything you know. D1 is now substantially faster: up to 20x faster on the well-known Northwind Traders Demo, which we’ve just migrated to use our new storage backend. Our new architecture also increases write performance: a simple benchmark inserting 1,000 rows (each row about 200 bytes wide) is approximately 6.8x faster than the previous version of D1.

With the current open alpha release, Cloudflare introduces a new console interface to issue queries directly from the dashboard, support for JSON function, and Location Hints, an option to determine where the leader database is located globally. Cloudflare confirmed as well that it is currently working on Time Travel, a point-in-time-recovery option that allows restoring a D1 database to any minute within the last 30 days or to a specific transaction.

# Using a precise Unix timestamp (in UTC):
$ wrangler d1 time-travel my-database --before-timestamp=1683570504

# Alternatively, restore prior to a specific transaction ID:
$ wrangler d1 time-travel my-database --before-tx-id=01H0FM2XHKACETEFQK2P5T6BWD

Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/d1-turning-it-up-to-11/

According to the roadmap, Cloudflare plans to offer soon, databases up to 1GB, metrics and observability using GraphQL API, and automatic read replication. Silverlock and Maddern add:

We’re also exploring features that can surface larger changes to your database state, including making it easier to identify schema changes, the number of tables, large deltas in data stored, and even specific queries (via transaction IDs).

Commenting on the Developer Week announcements, Jeremy Daly, author of the weekly serverless newsletter Off-by-none, writes:

I’m not sure AWS is quaking in their boots just yet, but obviously, Cloudflare is making some pretty serious moves to compete with some of their core services.

Cloudflare revealed the expected prices even if billing will not be enabled until later this year, with D1 at the moment free to use and a free tier expected in the future. With a relatively simple billing model, Cloudflare will charge three components: the number of writes (as 1KB units), the number of reads (as 4KB units), and storage. Global read replication will not incur additional costs and the authors challenge alternative serverless databases:

We wanted to ensure D1 took the best parts of serverless pricing — scale-to-zero and pay-for-what-you-use — so that you’re not trying to figure out how many CPUs and/or how much memory you need for your workload.

Following the announcement, Cloudflare updated its documentation, added example projects, and opened a #d1 Discord channel.

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