Databases

  In May 2022, we announced our quest to simplify databases – building them, maintaining them, integrating them. Our goal is to empower you with the tools to run a database that is powerful, scalable, with world-beating performance without any hassle. And we first set our sights on reimagining the database development experience for every type of user – not just database experts. Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working to create just that, while learning some very important lessons along the way. As it turns out, building a global relational database product on top of Workers pushes the boundaries of the developer platform to their absolute limit, and often beyond them, but in a way that’s absolutely thrilling to us at Cloudflare. It means that while our progress might seem slow from outside, every improvement, bug fix or stress test helps lay down a path for all of our customers to build the world’s most ambitious serverless application. However, as we continue down the road to making D1 production ready, it wouldn’t be “the Cloudflare way” unless we stopped for feedback first – even though it’s not quite finished yet. In the spirit of Developer Week, there is no better time to introduce the D1 open alpha! An “open alpha” is a new concept for us. You’ll likely hear the term “open beta” on various announcements at Cloudflare, and while it makes sense for many products here, it wasn’t quite right for D1. There are still some crucial pieces that are still in active development and testing, so before we release the fully-formed D1 as a public beta for you to start building real-world apps with, we want to make sure everybody can start to get a feel for the product on their hobby apps or side-projects. What’s included in the alpha? While a lot is still changing behind the scenes with D1, we’ve put a lot of thought into how you, as a developer, interact with it – even if you’re new to databases. Using the D1 dashboard In a few clicks you can get your D1 database up and running right from within your dashboard. In our D1 interface, you can create, maintain and view your database as you please. Changes made in the UI are instantly available to your Worker – no redeploy required! Use Wrangler If you’re looking to get your hands a little dirty, you can also work with your database using our Wrangler CLI. Create your database and begin adding your data manually or bootstrap your database with one of two ways: 1.  Execute an SQL file $ wrangler d1 execute my-database-name –file ./customers.sql where your .sql file looks something like this: customers.sql DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Customers; CREATE TABLE Customers (CustomerID INT, CompanyName TEXT, ContactName TEXT, PRIMARY KEY (`CustomerID`)); INSERT INTO Customers (CustomerID, CompanyName, ContactName) VALUES (1, ‘Alfreds Futterkiste’, ‘Maria Anders’),(4, ‘Around the Horn’, ‘Thomas Hardy’),(11, ‘Bs Beverages’, ‘Victoria Ashworth’),(13, ‘Bs Beverages’, ‘Random Name’); 2. Create and run migrations Migrations are a way to version your database changes. With D1, you can create a migration and then apply it to your database. To create the migration, execute: wrangler d1 migrations create This will create an SQL file in a migrations folder where you can then go ahead and add your queries. Then apply the migrations to your database by executing: wrangler d1 migrations apply Access D1 from within your Worker You can attach your D1 to a Worker by adding the D1 binding to your wrangler.toml configuration file. Then interact with D1 by executing queries inside your Worker like so: export default { async fetch(request, env) { const { pathname } = new URL(request.url); if (pathname === “/api/beverages”) { const { results } = await env.DB.prepare( “SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CompanyName = ?” ) .bind(“Bs Beverages”) .all(); return Response.json(results); } return new Response(“Call /api/beverages to see Bs Beverages customers”); }, }; Or access D1 from within your Pages Function In this Alpha launch, D1 also supports integration with Cloudflare Pages! You can add a D1 binding inside the Pages dashboard, and write your queries inside a Pages Function to build a full-stack application! Check out the full documentation to get started with Pages and D1. Community built tooling During our private alpha period, the excitement behind D1 led to some valuable contributions to the D1 ecosystem and developer experience by members of the community. Here are some of our favorite projects to date: d1-orm An Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is a way for you to query and manipulate data by using JavaScript. Created by a Cloudflare Discord Community Champion, the d1-orm seeks to provide a strictly typed experience while using D1: const users = new Model( // table name, primary keys, indexes etc tableDefinition, // column types, default values, nullable etc columnDefinitions ) // TS helper for typed queries type User = Infer; // ORM-style query builder const user = await users.First({ where: { id: 1, }, }); You can check out the full documentation, and provide feedback by making an issue on the GitHub repository. workers-qb This is a zero-dependency query builder that provides a simple standardized interface while keeping the benefits and speed of using raw queries over a traditional ORM. While not intended to provide ORM-like functionality, workers-qb makes it easier to interact with the database from code for direct SQL access: const qb = new D1QB(env.DB) const fetched = await qb.fetchOne({ tableName: ’employees’, fields: ‘count(*) as count’, where: { conditions: ‘department = ?1’, params: [‘HQ’], }, }) You can read more about the query builder here. d1-console Instead of running the wrangler d1 execute command in your terminal every time you want to interact with your database, you can interact with D1 from within the d1-console. Created by a Discord Community Champion, this gives the benefit of executing multi-line queries, obtaining command history, and viewing a cleanly formatted table output. While this is a community project today, we plan to natively support a “D1