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To be fair, you can't read any files without software, you need a text editor even for plaintext. However, all software is not equal. Any OS comes with a text

by Drakim 9y ago

To be fair, you can't read any files without software, you need a text editor even for plaintext. However, all software is not equal. Any OS comes with a text editor and a ZIP utility by default now. The same is not true for SQLite's format.

MrQuincle 9y ago
I don't think that's true. Does Ubuntu come with zip by default now? Normally tar balls are used and zip has to installed afterwards: apt install zip I read the article as advocating for more open binary formats. That it is useful to have binary formats is logical. That someone would like to have open ones is I think a nice thought.
TuringTest 9y ago
But it could easily become true if SQLite was a common document format. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, OS didn't come with a ZIP utility either.
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
Arguably, any OS should come with SQLite too. It's pretty close to being as standard as text (which can be complicated too sometimes).
pyre 9y ago
> The same is not true for SQLite's format. That's not entirely true. Anything that comes with Python installed has SQLite bundled/compiled in. It's just the library, not the cli, but still.
justinclift 9y ago
Which OS doesn't come with SQLite? • Win 10 apparently does (I don't use it, so can't personally verify). Win7/8 don't. • Every version of OSX for many years does • Fairly sure the main Linux distro's do • FreeBSD does, not sure about NetBSD/DragonFlyBSD though. Checking a local OpenBSD 6.x box just now, sqlite/sqlite3 aren't in the default user path, so maybe that's one that doesn't.
yellowapple 9y ago
"Any OS comes with a text editor and a ZIP utility by default now." The same thing is becoming true of SQLite (and pretty much is true if you exclude older versions of Windows). We're talking about one of the two (estimated) most-widely-deployed software projects in the world today (http://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html http://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html). It's FOSS, ubiquitous, easily embeddable, works remarkably well, and has bindings for pretty much every programming language under the sun. As far as a general-purpose file format goes, a SQLite database is thus pretty close to ideal.

by Drakim 9y ago

MrQuincle 9y ago

I don't think that's true. Does Ubuntu come with zip by default now? Normally tar balls are used and zip has to installed afterwards: apt install zip I read the article as advocating for more open binary formats. That it is useful to have binary formats is logical. That someone would like to have open ones is I think a nice thought.

TuringTest 9y ago

But it could easily become true if SQLite was a common document format. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, OS didn't come with a ZIP utility either.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago

Arguably, any OS should come with SQLite too. It's pretty close to being as standard as text (which can be complicated too sometimes).

pyre 9y ago

> The same is not true for SQLite's format. That's not entirely true. Anything that comes with Python installed has SQLite bundled/compiled in. It's just the library, not the cli, but still.

justinclift 9y ago

Which OS doesn't come with SQLite? • Win 10 apparently does (I don't use it, so can't personally verify). Win7/8 don't. • Every version of OSX for many years does • Fairly sure the main Linux distro's do • FreeBSD does, not sure about NetBSD/DragonFlyBSD though. Checking a local OpenBSD 6.x box just now, sqlite/sqlite3 aren't in the default user path, so maybe that's one that doesn't.

yellowapple 9y ago

"Any OS comes with a text editor and a ZIP utility by default now." The same thing is becoming true of SQLite (and pretty much is true if you exclude older versions of Windows). We're talking about one of the two (estimated) most-widely-deployed software projects in the world today (http://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html http://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html). It's FOSS, ubiquitous, easily embeddable, works remarkably well, and has bindings for pretty much every programming language under the sun. As far as a general-purpose file format goes, a SQLite database is thus pretty close to ideal.