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I ran a regional booking service on it for two years and spent weekends clearing locked-database errors. The no pricing part is convenient. No vendor means no one to page when it wedges at 2am.
Locked databases mean you misused WAL mode, not a flaw. 2015 numbers still hold.
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.
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.
That concurrency argument only works if you ignore how SQLite actually behaves under write contention. One writer at a time is not a footnote, it is the design. WAL helps readers, it does not magically let fifty concurrent transactions update the same file. Those 200 statements per page turn into lock waits fast, and the app tier is not the bottleneck if the database is refusing to commit. Oracle sells pain, sure, but the pain starts inside the file first on any page with real write traffic.
> app-server layer becomes the bottleneck
yeah that's been my experience too. file never sweats, it's the templating and those 200 queries per dynamic page that kill you first.
my quick checklist is run it under load with WAL on, synchronous=NORMAL, bump cache_size to fit the working set, then .timer on in sqlite3 shell version 3.22.0 and EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN the hot paths. most sites under that 100K hits a day pattern never touch disk limits anyway when max is 281 terabytes, it's just dumb N+1s in the app code showing up.
Yeah exactly, Oracle is selling to teams that need concurrency, not a file that handles 80k hits. I liked using R to prototype against SQLite before moving to postgres, zero setup and the Tcl core just works. Why would anyone spin up a server for that stage? Also the 281 terabyte size limit shows it was never meant to be a tiny toy.
The pricing angle is the confusion though. It's public domain, funded by donations, so R prototyping and Tcl embedding cost nothing to distribute. That model explains why the 281 terabyte limit is just a theoretical max, not a sales target.
Right, spinning up Postgres for prototyping is masochism. Zero-admin fopen replacement wins every time! Pricing is still opaque on the page, and there's zero clarity on what paid support or ops coverage actually costs in practice.
Exactly, same reason I reach for it over MySQL for prototyping. Requires no administration and just works.
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.
The fopen line is about replacing ad-hoc file code, not beating fsync latency, so demanding power-loss iops misses the point. I clicked through a couple footnotes and one link just spun and never loaded, which didn't help.
On traffic, is it fewer than 100K hits per day or 400K to 500K requests per day? Those read like different units mashed together.
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 281 terabyte figure is theoretical, not what you'll actually get. i once tried to grow a 300GB sqlite analytics db on ext4 for a side project and hit file size and backup pain long before anything sqlite-specific kicked in.
most consumer filesystems, cheap VPS images, and backup tools cap you far earlier, so why quote a max no real deployment will ever touch? it misleads people sizing archives.
it's just quoting sqlite's theoretical ceiling like fopen's, to show file replacement won't hit a practical limit there
I've used it for device-local storage on flaky field hardware and that part holds up. The fopen comparison is right, it beats rolling your own file format every time and requires no administration which actually matters when nobody can babysit the box.
Still not buying the edge hype as written. One file means one bad power cut or full disk and the whole app state is suspect. Backups and WAL help until they don't. Fine for caches and local queues. I wouldn't trust it as the sole store for anything I can't afford to rebuild.
> 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?
yeah that single-writer thing's a dealbreaker for anything actually multi-user, sharding per user sounds nice on paper till you're babysitting a thousand files. and that local storage for flaky hotel wifi joke practically writes itself - library's so small it loads before the captive portal does. how're you handling migrations across all those shards though?
Yeah babysitting a thousand files gets old fast. This just feels like good old Berkeley DB with SQL. Litestream replication helps for edge backups of those shards.
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.
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.
That misses the bottleneck. A hit isn't one query. The page notes dynamic pages use about 200 SQL statements per webpage, so 100K hits is roughly 20 million statements a day hitting a single file with one writer lock. Faster hardware helps reads, it doesn't change serialized writes or lock contention when every page view needs a handful of writes. The 100K figure was always a rule of thumb for most sites doing that kind of work, not a hard benchmark, and dismissing it as outdated ignores the query count per hit entirely.
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!
This Postgres-first default is cargo culting. Most side projects and growing sites never hit write contention, and until then you're just babysitting a server, users, backups for no benefit.
SQLite handles low to medium traffic with zero admin and a single file you can move anywhere. Why take on operational pain on day one for a scale problem you probably won't have?
Edge deployments benefit from local storage offline
Local storage helps offline, but locking on edge filesystems is the risk. SQLite relies on file locks that can misbehave on NFS and some network or unreliable edge filesystems, so that offline benefit is not automatic.
> 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.
It's also that it requires no administration, right? Even with unreliable connectivity?
fopen never survived airplane mode either
> Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three
This SQL archives thing just sounds like zip for app assets, doesn't it? what's it do that a zip don't already handle fine?
Local storage per app/device is exactly why we use it. What about backup on Windows?
How is commercial support priced versus PostgreSQL support options?
SQLite is public domain, license cost zero. Commercial support is optional third-party help, not per-seat licensing. PostgreSQL support plans price by response time and coverage, not by the software itself.
been running sqlite embedded in a couple python tools and one old tcl utility for years and the requires no administration thing is exactly why i haven't ripped it out.
people underestimate how much time you waste babysitting a real server. with postgres or mysql you got users, permissions, daemon config, backups that need their own cron job, some upgrade that breaks everything. with sqlite i just ship the file. python's sqlite3 is already there, tcl has had it forever, no installer, no service to restart. it just works.
what i liked on that page is how blunt they are about not competing with client-server databases. they say it competes with fopen and yeah that's the right framing. i'm not building a shared backend for 50 services, i'm trying to avoid writing my own busted file format and parser. why would i hand roll json lines or csv with locking when i can just use sql and get transactions for free?
and yet they don't oversell it either. they admit 100k hits a day is fine, 10x that is doable, and they even throw out their own numbers from 2015 with 400-500k requests. that's honest. most embedded use doesn't need more.
have you ever tried to deploy something to a box with flaky internet where you can't depend on a remote db? that's where it thrives. no admin, file is the db, copy it, move it, done.
281 terabytes limit is kind of funny, like you'll never hit it in this use case but nice to know it's not gonna be the bottleneck.