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I have much the same sentiment with SQLite. Much dismissed as a toy database, but absolutely appropriate for 99% of my clients - small and medium businesses, th

I have much the same sentiment with SQLite. Much dismissed as a toy database, but absolutely appropriate for 99% of my clients - small and medium businesses, the same as mentioned in thread.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
SQLite is amazing. It should definitely get more popular - it gives you relational DB features while still storing everything in a file. Which means portability, performance, and no bloating the entire OS with another database driver / server.
- davidw 11y ago
  It's extremely popular: it's on pretty much every smartphone, IIRC.
  - macintux 11y ago
    I recall a piece recently where someone asserted it's the most widely-deployed software in the world, largely for this reason.
  - bosky101 11y ago
    apple's native graph database called "core data" is also built on sqlite. mnesia lets you decide on a per table basis - where should be stored: 1) ram only 2) disk only 3) disk copies ( cached, and persisted stored to disk) as well the option of how it should be accessed in a cluster 1) replicated (to a set of nodes you want) 2) or location transparent ( accessible from any node you want ) i doubt any dbms gives you this kind of distributed systems friendly primitives. my only peeve against mnesia is corruption. if you change these nodes, or one of them are down, or you call it with the wrong list of nodes ( eg: you may now need a distribtued store like zk just to get this list of nodes right), and many different things can go wrong which is why most folks use it for idempotent store. something that can be recreated if needed, and then used to great effect - but never as "the" persistent store. additionally there are limits on the size of these tables, and workarounds. once bootstrapped - it works like a dream. mnesia is still my go to dbs for a distributed cache or router for actors. ~B
- acveilleux 11y ago
  It shows up in all sorts of places. It's completely eclipsed the BerkeleyDB/DBM type of databases in most of their use cases. The main thing is that it's usually embedded into something else like say Subversion.
Tistel 11y ago
I was working at a place that had decided that they needed "big data tools" and part of the team was developing a Hadoop data cluster and myriad of other tools (Tableau, Reddis cache etc). I put all the campaign (it was an ad tech company) data that we actually used to alter bidding behaviour and it could fit into a sqlite3 DB that was < 5MB. Using python the sqlite DB worked like a charm.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  People like to believe that they have "big problems" and that they need large scale solutions. If they ever manage to get it working correctly they now have big system administration problems on top of their existing problem. Where as doing backups, creating staging/testing environments or moving servers can be done with cp or scp when running SQLite. Agreeably if you pick SQLite and ever manage to reach a scale where it's no longer an appropriate solution, then you will have more trouble migrating of it.
  - dtech 11y ago
    I would say that SQLite transitions quite nicely, as far as transitions go, into a client-server SQL RDBMS.
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    > People like to believe that they have "big problems" and that they need large scale solutions. People like to believe that they will have big problems and will need large scale solutions, and often make the call to plan accordingly. Decision-making for this sort of thing is a tightrope walk across a bunch of unknowables affecting a bunch of trade-offs.
mercurial 11y ago
I like a lot of things about sqlite, but I don't like the fact that it doesn't enforce types.
- krylon 11y ago
  That would be nice, at least as an option. Theoretically, one could use triggers to enforce types. Not sure if that is worth the hassle, though.

I have much the same sentiment with SQLite. Much dismissed as a toy database, but absolutely appropriate for 99% of my clients - small and medium businesses, the same as mentioned in thread.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

SQLite is amazing. It should definitely get more popular - it gives you relational DB features while still storing everything in a file. Which means portability, performance, and no bloating the entire OS with another database driver / server.

davidw 11y ago
It's extremely popular: it's on pretty much every smartphone, IIRC.
- macintux 11y ago
  I recall a piece recently where someone asserted it's the most widely-deployed software in the world, largely for this reason.
- bosky101 11y ago
  apple's native graph database called "core data" is also built on sqlite. mnesia lets you decide on a per table basis - where should be stored: 1) ram only 2) disk only 3) disk copies ( cached, and persisted stored to disk) as well the option of how it should be accessed in a cluster 1) replicated (to a set of nodes you want) 2) or location transparent ( accessible from any node you want ) i doubt any dbms gives you this kind of distributed systems friendly primitives. my only peeve against mnesia is corruption. if you change these nodes, or one of them are down, or you call it with the wrong list of nodes ( eg: you may now need a distribtued store like zk just to get this list of nodes right), and many different things can go wrong which is why most folks use it for idempotent store. something that can be recreated if needed, and then used to great effect - but never as "the" persistent store. additionally there are limits on the size of these tables, and workarounds. once bootstrapped - it works like a dream. mnesia is still my go to dbs for a distributed cache or router for actors. ~B
acveilleux 11y ago
It shows up in all sorts of places. It's completely eclipsed the BerkeleyDB/DBM type of databases in most of their use cases. The main thing is that it's usually embedded into something else like say Subversion.

Tistel 11y ago

I was working at a place that had decided that they needed "big data tools" and part of the team was developing a Hadoop data cluster and myriad of other tools (Tableau, Reddis cache etc). I put all the campaign (it was an ad tech company) data that we actually used to alter bidding behaviour and it could fit into a sqlite3 DB that was < 5MB. Using python the sqlite DB worked like a charm.

mrweasel 11y ago
People like to believe that they have "big problems" and that they need large scale solutions. If they ever manage to get it working correctly they now have big system administration problems on top of their existing problem. Where as doing backups, creating staging/testing environments or moving servers can be done with cp or scp when running SQLite. Agreeably if you pick SQLite and ever manage to reach a scale where it's no longer an appropriate solution, then you will have more trouble migrating of it.
- dtech 11y ago
  I would say that SQLite transitions quite nicely, as far as transitions go, into a client-server SQL RDBMS.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  > People like to believe that they have "big problems" and that they need large scale solutions. People like to believe that they will have big problems and will need large scale solutions, and often make the call to plan accordingly. Decision-making for this sort of thing is a tightrope walk across a bunch of unknowables affecting a bunch of trade-offs.

mercurial 11y ago

I like a lot of things about sqlite, but I don't like the fact that it doesn't enforce types.

krylon 11y ago
That would be nice, at least as an option. Theoretically, one could use triggers to enforce types. Not sure if that is worth the hassle, though.