The only case I witnessed where the interface remained untouched, even as we went from an rdmbs backend to kvo and back again, was Twitter. You can argue the re

The only case I witnessed where the interface remained untouched, even as we went from an rdmbs backend to kvo and back again, was Twitter. You can argue the reason is the data model being simple, which makes sense. Everywhere else, it was different degrees of “pain”. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, and I don’t think avoiding a potential future rewrite at all cost are worthwhile goals. WRT sqlite, the obvious advantage is test setup doesn’t require any local infra, and it forces your system to NOT use vendor-specific features. That school of design is essential for places that want to avoid lockin for whatever reason. This isn’t possible in every case - some companies have a great DBA team, for instance, or strong specialization around a specific db (cough Oracle shops cough), so obviously that flexibility wouldn’t be advantageous. As everything else in our industry, it depends :)