Many times the thought “what if we just shipped the database to the client” has crossed my mind in large multi tenant apps where individual datasets were relatively small. I’ve never gone far with it as it seems sufficiently outside the norm to be a cursed architectural pattern. Would be nice to find out I was wrong.
I once did this with a calorie counting app. Even with hundreds of thousands of foods in the database, the app took much less space than most media apps or games.
I'm also interested to find out if it's cursed :) So far it's been a lot better than I expected. Apps like https://sqlsync-todo.pages.dev are trivialised with this pattern.
Tons of work to do in order to really prove it out though. But I'm pretty excited to keep pushing and see where this goes.
The correct answer is to move the UI back to the server, where the database already is, and just send html to the client side html renderer (or "web browser"). This whole post is just "front end and gone off the rails, over the cliff, and into the ocean."
