Local First – CouchDB

Poor WiFi shouldn’t mean poor data.

Whether your team is working from the wilderness or the warehouse, they need to be able to access your data, update records, input data, and generate reports. Waiting for strong WiFi isn’t an option. That’s why we offer a local-first option for our custom databases.

What “Local-First” Means

With a local-first database, your users can do what they’d normally do with a database, such as pull reports, update account records, view dashboards, etc. Whether they’re in or outside of WiFi range doesn’t matter – your employees are never out of commission.

How Local-First Works

The big differentiator from a traditional database is that with the local-first version, new data is stored first on the hard drive of the computer or device being used.

Why is that a big deal? Well, it means that employees working in places without reliable WiFi access can continue doing their jobs with the data they have – and when they return to an area with a strong internet connection, their updates are made to the main database.

Thanks to technologies like CouchDB and MongoDB, there’s no need to rely on notes or hazy memories – the data is recorded when it’s fresh, and uploaded when internet is available.

Benefits of a Local-First Database

A local-first database offers several key benefits for organizations:

• Employees can work from anywhere. Even if there’s no internet access, employees have the data they need saved on their device for future synchronization with the main database.
• No downtime while working. Because your data is on the device, it’s always available – even when internet access to your database is not.
• Team members can continue to collaborate on documents and records. In many cloud-based apps and databases, problems can arise when more than one person has a record open at once – but that’s not a problem when you’re working local-first.

We love helping our clients overcome difficult data challenges – even when the challenge is less about data and more about access. If you’d like to talk about how a local-first database could help your team, We Build Databases can help!