Show HN: Sir – Git-diff-able JSON database on yer filesystem

Slightly off topic - can we use git-diff-able databases for faster syncing of clients with servers?

Or is there no practical difference?

We can return just the latest updated documents by maintaining a lastUpdated timestamp on client and server docs. But this would be at a document level. So, only the fields that have changed would be sent to the client.

I'm not sure if it would be faster or less data but this is certainly diffable at the document>-field level. Each field gets its own line at least

Never trust a clock.

Yeah wall clock isn't reliable. But if the server could send a global version/logical clock, then the client can say this is the latest version I've got. Which is essentially what tcp, git, etc do.

An mutch easier solution that gets you 90% of the way is to just use a binary patcher (like bsdiff) with whatever database format you're already using.

bsdiff doesn't scale to gigabytes-- vcdiff or rsync will work better

How about a version chain?