REST API Limitations: Partial Search and External Integration Challenges

[jessekimotho]

Hi Dexie Cloud team and @dfahlander ,

I’m currently using Dexie Cloud to power a drug formulary PWA targeted at the Kenyan market. The offline-first approach using IndexedDB has been fantastic for local performance. However, I’m now looking to expose my data via an API for external integrations—for example, a prescription creation app requested an endpoint to search for drugs by partial names (e.g., “Amoxi”).

The issue is that the current Dexie Cloud REST API only supports basic equality filtering. To achieve a partial search, I’m forced to fetch the entire table (around 4 seconds for ~4000 documents), which is far from ideal. In a test migration to Supabase, query times dropped to around 100-200ms.

This raises a couple of questions for me:

Am I misunderstanding the primary intent of Dexie Cloud? Is it mainly designed as an IndexedDB wrapper for offline-first apps rather than as a full-featured DBaaS with advanced query capabilities?
Is there a better way (or a recommended pattern) to build a REST API on top of Dexie Cloud that supports partial searches or more advanced queries? Or is creating an npm package to abstract this functionality a better approach (with the limitation that it only works where IndexedDB is available)?

Some other options I was considering are: Supabase +. PowerSync or Firestore with offline data persistence.

Any guidance or recommendations on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your work on Dexie Cloud!