I used PGLite for a project (monkeys.zip) and it was absolutely fantastic! Loved how speedily I could have a "real" postgres instance without spinning up docker. Worked really really well with pnpm workspaces and a monorepo setup (EG pnpm run will run the DB package, as well as frontend and backend).
The only downside (and this applies for SQLite as well) is that it runs too well that you can get some bad habits - or at least follow patterns that don't support horizontal scaling which you would want to do in production. A number of problems across different projects have bit me because I relied too long on SQLite (or PGLite) when moving from local dev to setting up cloud infra. This includes things like connection pooling, read replicas, consistency issues with sharding. Maybe all those people who productionize *Lite have a point!
Both will either download or ship the postgres binary with your app, and run it in a separate process. Pglite is different, it's actually a library (they have stripped some parts of the postgres source code) and it could in principle be ported to be used as a native library (meaning, you link to it and run as a single program)
There's even a draft PR to do this, but it became stale
I used PGLite for a project (monkeys.zip) and it was absolutely fantastic! Loved how speedily I could have a "real" postgres instance without spinning up docker. Worked really really well with pnpm workspaces and a monorepo setup (EG pnpm run will run the DB package, as well as frontend and backend).
The only downside (and this applies for SQLite as well) is that it runs too well that you can get some bad habits - or at least follow patterns that don't support horizontal scaling which you would want to do in production. A number of problems across different projects have bit me because I relied too long on SQLite (or PGLite) when moving from local dev to setting up cloud infra. This includes things like connection pooling, read replicas, consistency issues with sharding. Maybe all those people who productionize *Lite have a point!
Also checkout https://www.doltgres.com/
Pgembed is pglite for native code.
Which one? https://github.com/Ladybug-Memory/pgembed or https://github.com/faokunega/pg-embed ?
Both will either download or ship the postgres binary with your app, and run it in a separate process. Pglite is different, it's actually a library (they have stripped some parts of the postgres source code) and it could in principle be ported to be used as a native library (meaning, you link to it and run as a single program)
There's even a draft PR to do this, but it became stale
https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/pull/842
Right now what exists is, grabbing the pglite wasm and running it on native code on wasi
https://github.com/f0rr0/pglite-oxide