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SQLite is cute and very appropriate in certain cases: - Local storage for a mobile/desktop app, instead of a DIY file type. - Local cache storage for a d

SQLite is cute and very appropriate in certain cases: - Local storage for a mobile/desktop app, instead of a DIY file type. - Local cache storage for a distributed system, instead of a DIY file type. While you can use it as a general backend, and some people work hard to make it usable in distributed systems, it continues to be a fancy elaborate project to turn SQLite into something it isn't. It's a thought experiment that happens to get corporate funding. It's fun and interesting in the same way as Dogecoin is. There's plenty of free DBaaS these days that are frankly incredible and FREE. I work for one, so might sound like I'm chilling that space. But I recently went to work for one exactly because I think the new offerings are an incredible leap forward in developer productivity, and there's a lot of cool stuff to be done here. I could instead have gone to work for one of those who are working on SQLite, but I just don't believe they're real products for real web workloads. They're a marketing catch for curious learners and experimenters. I respect the intellectual curiosity but it's not how I would build anything.

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simonw 3y ago
Free is a difficult promise to keep for the long run, which makes it hard to strategically depend on. Heroku was free for 15 years!
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  If you're building a business, the Free tier should be a starting point, not a forever solution. Either the business dies, or it grows and you'll graduate to a paid option very quickly.
  - simonw 3y ago
    Sure, but building a business isn't the only reason for people to select a hosting solution. Personal side projects are the most obvious example. I do a lot of work in journalism. Newsrooms don't have a budget for maintaining interactive apps they built for a story that ran ten years ago, so they often made the sensible (at the time) decision to deploy them as a free, scale-to-zero Heroku instance. Those apps are all gone now, thanks to Heroku bait-and-switching. Many of those same newsrooms were paying customers of Heroku for other purposes!

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simonw 3y ago

Free is a difficult promise to keep for the long run, which makes it hard to strategically depend on. Heroku was free for 15 years!

AYBABTME 3y ago
If you're building a business, the Free tier should be a starting point, not a forever solution. Either the business dies, or it grows and you'll graduate to a paid option very quickly.
- simonw 3y ago
  Sure, but building a business isn't the only reason for people to select a hosting solution. Personal side projects are the most obvious example. I do a lot of work in journalism. Newsrooms don't have a budget for maintaining interactive apps they built for a story that ran ten years ago, so they often made the sensible (at the time) decision to deploy them as a free, scale-to-zero Heroku instance. Those apps are all gone now, thanks to Heroku bait-and-switching. Many of those same newsrooms were paying customers of Heroku for other purposes!