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“Hey Claude, follow the self-hosted setup instructions in this guide https://docs.powersync.com/intro/setup-guide.md”
This actually works now!
We’ve been working hard on making our docs easier to follow by humans and agents alike, and the results are paying off.
AI tools are moving at tremendous speed (whatever happened to “prompt engineering”?) and while we might not always be shipping bleeding-edge integrations with Ralph loops or Moltbots, we are closely monitoring the space and want to support developers using these tools. We’re starting by revamping the PowerSync CLI which will form the foundation for our plans in this space, and our proposal for that is available here.
Product updates shipped:
- PowerSync Service
- SQL Server support has landed! SQL Server / Azure SQL databases can now be plugged into PowerSync. This has been one of our most requested features and we’re very excited to have this out for you to try. Learn more about how we built this integration in our feature story below.
- Capture custom metadata in sync logs – You can now attach custom metadata to client connections and have it show up in the Service/API logs, so you get richer context when inspecting and debugging syncs. For example, you can tag your logs with the user’s app version or a feature flag. See the docs to get started.
- Client SDKs
- GRDB integration for Swift (v1.9.0) – The Swift SDK now optionally integrates with GRDB so you can use its Swift-friendly, type-safe query APIs instead of writing raw SQL. Learn more.
- SQLite encryption support in Swift (v1.10.0) – If your Swift app stores sensitive data, you can now opt in to built-in SQLite database encryption, powered by %%SQLite3MultipleCiphers%%. Get started.
- PowerSync Cloud
- HIPAA – PowerSync Cloud is now HIPAA compliant. Our docs lay out the shared compliance model, what PowerSync covers, and what you control.
- Simplified navigation for PowerSync docs – We heard repeatedly that our docs were hard to navigate in certain scenarios, so we restructured them from the ground up: there’s now a single Setup Guide you can follow start-to-finish, plus a unified sidebar organized around what you’re trying to do and the order you’re likely to do it in. Check them out and learn more about what changed.
- Under-the-hood: Our Rust-based Sync Client has become the default in recent versions of our client SDKs. It’s been out for around half a year in an experimental state, and was used and refined extensively. You can currently still opt in to the native sync client implementations, but we have plans to completely remove these over time. If you are using the native sync client because of issues you found in the Rust-based version, please let us know.
- New demos & guides:
- Querying JSON data in SQLite with SQLite JSON functions
- How to pre-seed SQLite files for applications that download large volumes of data on initial sync
- Conflict resolution strategies beyond last-write-wins
- How to sync data by time ranges using Sync Rules
- Step-by-step guide for connecting Neon databases to PowerSync
Community feed:
- Conrad from our team retrospected on how our 2025 product roadmap turned out!
- We’ve started sharing our plans for projects we’re actively working on (or have lined up) – to make our thinking more transparent, and have these discussions in public. Here’s what we’re busy with:
- Our CLI is getting a major upgrade. Notable improvements are: adding support for self-hosted instances, helping with first-time setup, exposing diagnostics, making the CLI open source, and more.
- Roadmap for raw SQLite tables (which allow you to bypass our JSON-based view system). Our goal is to make them easier to use.
- We shared this proposal on making the .NET SDK’s schema definition syntax more .NET idiomatic, as well as some investigations into ORM support.
- It’s always fun to see PowerSync out in the wild: %%qwerty2k.%% shared PolyPod, a tool for tracking your podcast listening time. Check it out on the App Store. And %%varetalindinha%% launched Smart Expiry Tracker. Check it out on the App Store and Google Play.
- And as always, thanks for the many contributions in GitHub. It’s starting to get difficult to list them all! najamansari, flochaz, bfour, longfellowone, tristanwagner, hamzzy, stevenctl, and giovannibonetti-jota all contributed PRs recently 🙏
Feature story: SQL Server support
As mentioned above, PowerSync finally supports Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL as source databases, so you can sync from existing SQL Server backends into local SQLite clients. This was one of our most requested features.
Rather than rehash the background and design decisions here, we’re pointing you straight to Roland’s blog post – it dives into how the replication from SQL Server works, why we chose the mechanisms we did (CDC vs Change Tracking), and what that looks like under the hood.
That’s it for this issue.