The admin had no storage surface at all: nothing in ui-react named an engine, a
file or a size, so the one question a growing Base raises — how much is in here
and where is it — could only be answered by finding the process's data
directory.
`/v1/database` answers it, and Settings -> Data renders it. core.DescribeDatabase
measures the engine, the files while the app holds them, and a count per
collection through CountRecords, so both engines answer the same questions and
the answer has one shape. A collection the engine refuses to count reads as
unknown rather than as empty, and is logged, so one broken view leaves the rest
of the report standing rather than taking the page down.
core.ReclaimDatabase is the one thing the page can DO, and it does something
real: it rewrites both databases without the pages deleted records left behind,
folds the log back into them, refreshes the statistics, and returns the size
either side so the page reports what was freed rather than claiming something
was. Driven in a browser it took a database from 9.0 MB to 1.1 MB with the
record counts unchanged.
The rewrite goes BEFORE the fold. A VACUUM lands through the log like any other
write, so folding first leaves the whole rewrite sitting in the log and the app
holding more than it started with — 2,068,480 bytes to 2,665,912 that way, and
to 593,920 this way. Both orders shrink something, which is why
TestDatabaseReclaim measures each database separately: an earlier version was
satisfied by 8 KB off the auxiliary log and went on passing with the rewrite
removed entirely.
There is no switch, because whether an instance belongs on a server is the
host's question and Base stopped having an opinion about it. The page states
which of the two it is on and what the other would mean, and it does not name a
backend Base cannot open — a disabled control for one would be the datastore
tier constant again, in a place a customer can see.
core.LocalDatabase is now the single place that asks whether the app holds the
database; backup asked it inline and now asks it there. tests/engine gains the
cross-engine cases, which CI already runs against PostgreSQL 18 — the LLM.md
line saying it does not was two releases stale. The third copy of a byte
formatter went into ui-react/src/lib/format.ts and the two existing pages now
read from it.
