This looks like a pretty simple data solution that might work for Astro's audience (content sites and hobbyists). They've split the hosting into their studio product to provide a way to earn revenue. Essentially you host the DB with them and can access it remotely, but could also host it however you want, you'd just lose the Studio editor.
The Studio editor itself is pretty basic at the moment with a table view and a way to check SQL calls. You can't build schemas in the UI yet and what you get is mostly a dev wrap of existing tools (like Drizzle) that let you interact with your DB. Their demo shows the limitations here, with things like "email" not being able to validate in the studio editor. My guess is that's coming later, but I might have missed it in the docs. Either way, it's nice that your config is stored at the code layer.
Most of these small websites that Astro is great fit need small CMS systems, and studio doesn't look to provide any way to deal with images (at least on first check) so that's sort of a bummer. You'd need to wire up some references with Cloudflare I guess. Still reading here, but it'd be cool if that came natively. Storing, retrieving and resizing images is a pain. The column types allowed are pretty small (text, number, bool, date, json).
While simple. It looks like it'll be relatively speedy with retrieval because of it.
Right now though, as an actual CMS editor (which my guess is what most Astro folks really want) Studio feels way to simple to tell a client to use. I'm interested to see whether they go more in the direction of a generic database store (implied from the name) or more of a CMS to compete with the natural pairings of Contentful, Statamic and others. Webhooks as a launch feature is great! That'll help folks out.
Either way. I love this team and their perspective. They build cool stuff, open source a lot of it (check out Starlight for docs), and I'm excited to see where this one goes over time. Congrats on the launch.
Now I need to update my Astro site to 4.5 :)
Have you tried Eleventy? If you have, how, in your opinion, does Astro compare?
Overall it feels a little less bare bones, while still being flexible.
But I do wonder how this type of thing will actually compete against a billion headless CMSes and a million PaaSes already on the market...
They won't. I, for one, hate that runtimes like Deno and frameworks like Astro start offering paid infrastructure. This smells like lock-in from a million years away.
I worry too, but here you can export as sql and csv.
+----------+------------------------+----------------+---------------+
| | Base Storage + Cost/GB | Reads | Writes |
+----------+------------------------+----------------+---------------+
| Astro DB | 1GB + $1.00 | 1b + $0.001/m | 1m + $1.00/m |
| D1 Free | 5GB | 150m | 3m |
| D1 Paid | 5GB + $0.75 | 25b + $0.001/m | 50m + $1.00/m |
| Turso | 9GB + $0.75 | 1b + $0.001/m | 25m + $1.00/m |
+----------+------------------------+----------------+---------------+
What differentiates Astro DB is the deep integration with the Astro framework and providing an easy path for common scenarios. Astro DB is a higher-level product than using a database service directly. For example, Astro DB handles migrations transparently for you and guides you when manual intervention is needed, just from running `astro db push`.
Astro DB also includes a local story, by default you use a local SQLite database that you can seed (using db/seed.ts) for local development. You can even use it for a purely static site, although we're still working on making SSG use-cases more seamless. For now though, this gives you a great local workflow for development that you can think easily connect to production with `astro build --remote`.
As an aside: there are days when I wish I could avoid using the Astro component model entirely, do everything in Preact (or whatever), and still use the `client:*` directives when appropriate. I realize this is easier said than done and also probably not a reasonable thing for Astro itself to try and target -- but moving between Astro components and framework components always has just enough friction that it's something I think I'd enjoy using.
Out of curiosity, when you're building a mostly static site that might want occasional islands of interactivity, what do you reach for instead?
- 4.5 release
- Volar $10,000 grant
- Astro Studio/DB
I only wish this wasn't a javascript heavy thing and that I could interface with it in my language of choice. But as it says on the tin this is integrated well for the greater Astro ecosystem.
However, I think Turso & Cloudflare D1 currently have slightly better pricing.
Edit: I've read the readme, hoping for a take from anyone who gave it a try