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What TiDB-Wasm was—and was not
In a November 16, 2019 engineering post, PingCAP engineer Joshua Zhou described an experiment to compile TiDB, a database written in Go, into WebAssembly (Wasm) and run it in a web browser. The goal was to let people learn and experiment with SQL without downloading and configuring a database locally. The project began as a TiDB Hackathon 2019 idea.
Zhou called it a pilot: “Because of the limited time in Hackathon, TiDB Wasm could only serve as a pilot project.” That distinction matters. The post documents a proof of possibility and its engineering trade-offs; it does not establish that the full production TiDB service became a browser-native product, or that the demo remains available or maintained today. PingCAP’s original article
How a Go program runs as browser WebAssembly
WebAssembly is a portable binary format that browsers can execute, but a Go program targeting a browser needs more than a Wasm file. Go’s current browser-oriented target is js/wasm. The Go project documents the build command as:
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GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o main.wasmTo run the output in a browser, an HTML page loads the Wasm module and Go’s JavaScript support file, which connects the Go runtime to the JavaScript environment. The compiler and wasm_exec.js must come from the same major Go version; mismatching them can prevent the module from starting. Go documents this browser target separately from its WASI target, built with GOOS=wasip1 GOARCH=wasm and introduced in Go 1.21. WASI is not the browser target used by the TiDB pilot. Go’s WebAssembly documentation
Those commands explain today’s Go target conventions; they are not a recipe for rebuilding the 2019 TiDB project. Its dependency versions, source changes, and browser integration were specific to that implementation.
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What had to change to get TiDB working
Platform-specific dependencies
The team first confirmed that Go 1.11 had a WebAssembly port, then attempted to compile TiDB. Some dependencies contained platform-specific code that did not work for the browser-oriented target. PingCAP’s account describes adding local math utility files selected by build target: Linux builds continued to forward to upstream dependencies, while the JavaScript-target build used alternate functions that avoided the incompatible dependency path.
Runtime expectations
Compilation did not mean the program could start unchanged. TiDB expected filesystem callbacks that the browser support environment did not provide in the way it needed. The team mocked selected callbacks before starting the module. This illustrates a broader porting issue: browser builds must account for both compile-time platform differences and runtime services the application expects.
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How users entered SQL and saw results
Instead of building SQL execution from scratch, the team reused TiDB test-kit code to execute statements, then connected that execution path to browser input and output. A JavaScript console library provided a SQL prompt in the page. For scripts containing multiple statements, the team added a source command: it opened a local file picker and ran SQL from the selected file.
The article’s sample script demonstrates the intended learning flow: create a database and table, add an index, insert a row, and update it. The key design move was to expose an existing SQL execution path through browser controls, rather than treat the WebAssembly binary alone as a complete user interface.
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Why the pilot was not yet a comfortable browser database
PingCAP reported that the pilot’s Wasm files were almost 80 MB and that memory use was too high for a friendly browser experience. Those are the project authors’ historical figures and assessment at publication in 2019—not an independently reproduced test or a statement about current TiDB builds. The post also identified IndexedDB persistence as work still to implement, so it did not describe a database whose data was saved across browser sessions.
These constraints are distinct: a large download affects how quickly a page can start; high memory demand affects whether it runs comfortably; and persistence determines whether data remains after a page is closed or reloaded. Solving one does not automatically solve the others.
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Browser database considerations beyond TiDB-Wasm
SQLite’s separate browser-Wasm tutorial provides a useful comparison, but its details describe SQLite’s demo, not TiDB-Wasm. In that tutorial, the simple example is transient by default, browser and device storage limits vary, and long operations on the UI thread can block rendering. SQLite recommends using a Worker for longer-running operations, and notes that a web server is needed because browsers may refuse to load Wasm from a file:// URL. SQLite’s browser-Wasm tutorial
Quick Recap
- Persistence: Determine whether the application saves data, where it stores it, and what happens on reload. A browser database may be temporary unless persistent storage is deliberately implemented.
- Responsiveness: Consider whether database work runs on the page’s main thread or in a Worker. Long main-thread operations can prevent the interface from rendering.
- Download and memory: A program can compile to Wasm yet still be too large or memory-intensive for a smooth browser experience, as PingCAP reported for its 2019 pilot.
- Deployment: Serve the page and Wasm through a web server rather than assuming opening an HTML file directly will work.
- Scope: A local browser demo for learning SQL is a different goal from operating a production database service.
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