Subscriptions

With Space Cloud you can subscribe to realtime changes in your database.

How it works

The clients can subscribe to realtime changes in database by specifying a where clause. It’s similar to a normal query, however, it’s live i.e. the client gets updated on any changes in the result set.

Space Cloud sends the initial result set on subscription request. Thereafter, it only sends the changes and not the entire result set for efficienct bandwidth utilization. The client SDKs maintain the entire result for you based on the initial set and changes received there after. However, if you are only interested in the changes and not the entire result set, you can customize this behaviour.

Note: The feature of maintaining the entire result set is only available in client SDKs. In GraphQL, you can write a stateful link if you wish to maintain the entire result set.

Architecture

In order to offload the database, Space Cloud does not relies on any CDC (Change Data Capture) mechanism. Space Cloud uses it’s in-built eventing system and Nats (a pubsub broker) to guarantee that all changes irrespective of any network failures will be propagated to the clients over a bi-directional link in an orderly fashion.

Isolating the database querying and the realtime module helps it scale the realtime piece independent of database. However this poses some limitations which are acceptable for most applications.

Limitations

• The primary key must be _id in case of MongoDB and id for MySQL and Postgres and of type text, varchar or string.
• All documents to be inserted must have the _id (for MongoDB) or id (for MySQL and Postgres) fields set.
• The fields used in the where clause of liveQuery should not be updated by another request.
• All updates and deletes can be made on a single document only using the _id or id field in the where clause.
• All mutations (inserts, updates and deletes) have to take place via Space Cloud

Note: This limitations are only applicable if you intend to use the realtime functionality.