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What is the use case for this distributed SQLite compared to a "traditional" distributed database like DynamoDB, CouchDB, Foundation, Riak, TiDB or CockroachDB,

What is the use case for this distributed SQLite compared to a "traditional" distributed database like DynamoDB, CouchDB, Foundation, Riak, TiDB or CockroachDB, Mongo, etc. Is this intended for b2b applications, or b2c? Could you (theoretically) write Facebook with a couple billion users with such a distributed SQLite system (billions of sqlite files, or many many billions of rows in this sort of a system)? I think with huge amounts of optimization, you could at least attempt to do such a thing with most of the above or dynamodb (although it'd probably have hotspots). Just trying to wrap my head around this new offering and the types of apps it's aimed at.

tptacek 3y ago
It's a general approach for SQL-backed CRUD applications. If your application is (1) read-heavy (most are), especially if it's particularly read-heavy, and (2) benefits from snappy responses --- ie, if it's the kind of thing where you'd invest significant time in, like, serverside Javascript compilation --- and, especially, if (3) it wants to run in more than one geographical region at the same time, then LiteFS is an interesting way to slash database server round trip times out of your response budget. The best way to think about SQLite in modern CRUD apps is by thinking about the N+1 query problem. N+1 is an issue largely because of the round-trips between the app and the database server (in an n-tier architecture, those are virtually always separate servers; in a geographically distributed n-tier architecture, they're also far apart from each other). Think of SQLite as a tool that would allow you to just randomly write N+1 query logic without worrying about it. You'd probably still not do that, but that's the kind of thing SQLite ostensibly lets you get away with.
- superq 3y ago
  so... no to those questions?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Would I build a billion-record Facebook replacement in SQLite? Probably not. I probably wouldn't try to scale it up on vanilla Postgres, either.
    - superq 3y ago
      None of those listed options included Postgres, but Facebook originally was running on 30k+ MySQL servers, so clearly they made do.
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      Everything I listed at least claims to be a distributed database (also in the title of this article: "distributed sqlite"). However, Postgres is not and never claimed to be a distributed database, so you are erecting and attacking a strawman argument by choosing something that wasn't even in the list.

tptacek 3y ago

It's a general approach for SQL-backed CRUD applications. If your application is (1) read-heavy (most are), especially if it's particularly read-heavy, and (2) benefits from snappy responses --- ie, if it's the kind of thing where you'd invest significant time in, like, serverside Javascript compilation --- and, especially, if (3) it wants to run in more than one geographical region at the same time, then LiteFS is an interesting way to slash database server round trip times out of your response budget. The best way to think about SQLite in modern CRUD apps is by thinking about the N+1 query problem. N+1 is an issue largely because of the round-trips between the app and the database server (in an n-tier architecture, those are virtually always separate servers; in a geographically distributed n-tier architecture, they're also far apart from each other). Think of SQLite as a tool that would allow you to just randomly write N+1 query logic without worrying about it. You'd probably still not do that, but that's the kind of thing SQLite ostensibly lets you get away with.

superq 3y ago
so... no to those questions?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Would I build a billion-record Facebook replacement in SQLite? Probably not. I probably wouldn't try to scale it up on vanilla Postgres, either.
  - superq 3y ago
    None of those listed options included Postgres, but Facebook originally was running on 30k+ MySQL servers, so clearly they made do.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    Everything I listed at least claims to be a distributed database (also in the title of this article: "distributed sqlite"). However, Postgres is not and never claimed to be a distributed database, so you are erecting and attacking a strawman argument by choosing something that wasn't even in the list.