Cloudflare recently announced the open beta of its D1 serverless relational database built on SQLite.
The open beta of D1 continues on earlier company investments, with the most recent enhanced performance. With the open beta of D1, the company adds higher per-database storage limits and the ability to create more databases. Matt Silverlock, director of product at Cloudflare, and Ben Yule, engineering director at Cloudflare, write in their blog post on D1:
Developers on the Workers paid plan will now be able to grow each database up to 2GB and create 25 databases (up from 500MB and 10).
Moreover, the company will continue to work on unlocking even larger databases over the coming weeks and months: developers using the D1 beta will see automatic increases to these limits published on D1’s public changelog.
The open beta Time Travel capability announced earlier, is now available. It allows developers to roll their database back to a specific point in time: any minute in the last 30 days, and it is enabled for every D1 database by default.
# Let's go back in time.
➜ wrangler d1 time-travel restore northwind --timestamp="2023-09-23T14:20:00Z"
Restoring database northwind from bookmark 0000000b-00000002-00004ca7-9f3dba64bda132e1c1706a4b9d44c3c9
✔ OK to proceed (y/N) … yes
⚡️ Time travel in progress...
✅ Database dash-db restored back to bookmark 00000000-00000004-00004ca7-97a8857d35583887de16219c766c0785
↩️ To undo this operation, you can restore to the previous bookmark: 00000013-ffffffff-00004ca7-90b029f26ab5bd88843c55c87b26f497
Sample restoring back in time (Source: Cloudflare blog post)
Furthermore, the Workers for Platforms, the Functions as a Service (FaaS) offering, can use D1 to deploy a database per user – thus keeping customer data strongly separated from each other. For example, Silverlock and Yule mention RONIN, which is building an edge-first content and data platform backed by a dedicated D1 database per customer, which allows customers to place data closer to users and provides each customer isolation from the queries of others.
Mark Wheeler, a technical director at Reason Digital, mentions in a LinkedIn blog post the use cases for and who competes with D1:
Smaller applications that need state (more than just a simple key-value store) can now migrate to this solution and no longer need small Postgres or MySQL databases.
And:
The closest competitor with a similar pricing model is AWS DynamoDB; the advantage D1 has here is that it is SQL-based. This means you can keep your data models the same in order to get them to work on the platform.
Lastly, the company intends to make D1 generally available for production workloads earlier next year, 2024 Q1. Pricing of D1 now has a row-based model, and its details are available on the pricing page.