The portability pitch is exactly what makes me nervous for anything with sensitive data. A single file DB that you can just copy off a device is a gift to anyone who finds a lost laptop or phone.
I ran endpoint inventory for a 400-person field team for about 18 months and we had three stolen laptops in one quarter. Full disk encryption saved us twice, the third one was an older machine where it wasn't enforced and the SQLite file for the offline cache was sitting in app data completely readable. That one incident turned into weeks of breach notifications. This design assumes the device itself is trusted and never leaves the user's hands, which is not how hardware lives in the real world.
That 80K figure is exactly why Oracle doesn't lose sleep over this segment, they sell concurrency and ops teams, not storage. The site itself was doing 400K to 500K requests a day in 2015 with roughly 200 SQL statements per dynamic page. At that pattern, the app-server layer becomes the bottleneck long before the file format does.
How is commercial support priced versus PostgreSQL support options?
> Edge deployments benefit from local storage offline
Exactly, and requires no administration is the win. We ran point-of-sale terminals on SQLite for months offline, zero DBA, zero tuning. fopen is faster for appends but SQLite gave us transactions without babysitting a server. Client-server just collapses under that flaky link and costs more to keep alive.
> requires no administration
the traffic numbers are reassuring, but the single-writer limit makes me nervous for a multi-user app. could you add clearer sharding-per-user scalability guidance and concrete examples?
I ran a SQLite backend for three years handling maybe 80K hits a day, and it never once paged me at 3am. How is Oracle supposed to sell a database when fopen with indexes does the job for free? Their sales team must be terrified of a file that requires no administration.
Small fast reliable choose any three is plainly cheating. It is actually all three, plus requires no administration, and still handled four hundred thousand requests a day. Fopen never stood a chance. That slogan undersells it by at least two adjectives and an entire client server detour altogether.
The 400K to 500K requests per day figure from 2015 is ancient history at this point. Hardware, storage, and typical web stacks have changed completely since then, so it tells me nothing about current PostgreSQL comparisons or modern edge deployments.
Local storage per app/device is exactly why we use it. What about backup on Windows?
I still think growing sites should just start on Postgres. Why migrate later when writes start contending and you need real concurrency? SQLite is fine until it suddenly isn't!
The 100K hits per day figure feels outdated now. Most modern hardware and SQLite builds handle far more without falling over for typical read-heavy sites.
I've shipped a few embedded products that leaned on SQLite exactly like this. The fopen comparison never matched my experience on real flash. Reads might be close, but writes with fsync and WAL tuning tell a different story.
Without a reproducible benchmark on the same hardware and filesystem, that claim feels hand-wavy! I'd want to see iops and latency under power loss, not marketing.