You might’ve noticed we skipped the October update – we were heads-down shipping a lot of stuff and a bunch of us attended Sync Conf in San Francisco. Feels like a good problem to have, but we also want to keep you in the loop, so here’s a stacked October+November edition to make up for it!
Product updates shipped in October and November:
- TanStack DB Integration – You can now use TanStack DB collections on top of a PowerSync-backed SQLite store. This combines TanStack DB’s reactive, super fast in-memory queries and optimistic updates with PowerSync’s offline-first persistence, multi-tab sync, and real-time backend sync with solid conflict resolution. See our feature story below for more.
- PowerSync Capacitor SDK (alpha) – Capacitor projects (iOS, Android, or web) can now use PowerSync. The SDK uses native SQLite on mobile and WA-SQLite on web. That means one codebase for web + mobile for reliable persistence and sync in Capacitor apps. See the release notes.
- PowerSync Dashboard revamp – The new dashboard is live at dashboard.powersync.com! This release is a big step toward improved UI/UX and it now dogfoods the PowerSync Web SDK. This lays the groundwork for self-hosting the dashboard too. Note that we still need to port the current Alerts & Notifications functionality to it. If you need it, please use the legacy dashboard for now. It should be available in the new dashboard soon.
- SDK & under-the-hood improvements:
- For Dart/Flutter: we shipped improved attachment utilities under %%package:powersync_core/attachments/attachments.dart%% making file handling more robust, easier to maintain and more consistent with our other SDKs. Release notes.
- Support for custom better-sqlite3 forks in the Node.js SDK, which enables functionality such as database encryption. Note: initialization now requires loading the custom fork via a worker. See the docs.
- We published several new demos & guides:
- Using pg_ivm for JOINs in Sync Rules – showing how to use the %%pg_ivm%% Postgres extension to create materialized views with JOINs, then reference them in Sync Rules.
- E2EE chat app with PowerSync + Supabase – a full end-to-end encrypted chat example with real-time sync.
- Expo Background Tasks + PowerSync – a tutorial walking through how to wire up Expo’s BackgroundTask API to keep sync alive when apps are backgrounded.
- Server-side Dart backend (Serverpod) + PowerSync integration – a guide for full-stack Dart/Flutter projects with a Serverpod backend.
- Understanding the SQLite Database – a guide for accessing, inspecting, and optimizing PowerSync database files.
Community feed
- Conrad from our team spoke at Sync Conf about the landscape of SQLite in the browser – a video of the talk should be available soon!
- Loper shared how they built a personalized college-matching app using PowerSync + AI + RAG for real-time sync and background recommendation updates.
- Cinapse explained why they moved away from CRDTs for sync and adopted PowerSync.
- Facilitron walked us through their migration from MongoDB Atlas Device Sync to PowerSync – a useful reference for switching sync stacks.
- Alex Dumouchelle wrote about speeding up Electron apps by switching to local SQLite with PowerSync.
- I made the case that combining Supabase + PowerSync is the strongest stack for offline-first apps – check it out.
- Brandon Boswell launched Playlist – a calendar that helps you focus and actually get meaningful things done. Built with PowerSync!
- We published a new proposal: Bucket data on object storage for higher sync throughput. Please comment on it!
- %%js2702%% improved connection‑pool support in sqlite_async.dart, %%jonkan%% and %%CrownedPhoenix%% contributed to our Swift SDK and %%whygee-dev%% added TanStack's useQueries hook – huge thanks to everyone (several of you being repeat-contributors 🙏)!
Feature story: TanStack DB PowerSync Collection
TanStack DB is a very cool project – it’s a reactive in-memory store designed for super-fast queries and reactivity in web apps, and it is a good enabler for incremental adoption of sync. When it launched, we noticed people in the community asking for persistence support. Persistence is difficult with TanStack DB, and the team have said they won’t be focusing on it for now, so we decided to build a PowerSync integration that does provide persistence.
The PowerSync TanStack DB Collection brings first-class offline-first persistence and multi-tab sync to TanStack DB, and we compiled some handy bullets to help you understand the benefits:
What TanStack DB gives you:
- Fast in-memory queries (client-side IVM)
- Optimistic and synchronous query operations (synchronous operations are possible even if the underlying data source is async)
- Powerful query syntax which can be used to query multiple collections (from different sources) easily — think mixing data from SQLite and REST
- Reactivity and reactivity integrations with (many) popular app frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Angular)
What PowerSync adds:
- Offline-first persistence on top of battle-hardened SQLite. The PowerSync collection is currently the only TanStack DB collection that is backed by SQLite.
- Multi-tab sync: changes made in one tab instantly appear in all other tabs
- Real-time backend database sync (Postgres/MySQL/MongoDB)
- Automatic de/serialization between rich JS types and primitive SQLite types
We’re super excited to be partnering with the TanStack DB team, and look forward to future collaborations with them. Up next we want to investigate support for query driven sync – this would enable paging for massive synced tables without sacrificing on performance. We’re also working on an experimental, more lightweight variant – which we’re calling PowerSync Lite at this stage – which strips out SQLite from the stack. This means that you get these benefits of PowerSync and TanStack DB, but with a much smaller client bundle size and simpler setup (pure JS, no large WASM files, no WASM plugin configuration). We’re obviously big fans of SQLite, but we think this could be useful for customers who don’t need persistence.
That’s it for this issue.
- Kobie