It being so obvious, why is sqlite not the de facto standard?

chuckadams 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No network, no write concurrency, no types to speak of... Where those things aren't needed, sqlite is the de facto standard. It's everywhere.

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mickeyp 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Perfect summary. I'll add: insane defaults that'll catch you unaware if you're not careful! Like foreign keys being opt-in; sure, it'll create 'em, but it won't enforce them by default!

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ogogmad 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Is it possible to fix some of these limitations by building DBMSes on top of SQLite, which might fix the sloppiness around types and foreign keys?

	▲	Polizeiposaune 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Using the API with discipline goes a long way. Always send "pragma foreign_keys=on" first thing after opening the db. Some of the types sloppiness can be worked around by declaring tables to be STRICT. You can also add CHECK constraints that a column value is consistent with the underlying representation of the type -- for instance, if you're storing ip addresses in a column of type BLOB, you can add a CHECK that the blob is either 4 or 16 bytes.

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BenjiWiebe 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

SQLite did add 'STRICT' tables for type enforcement.

Still doesn't have a huge variety of types though.

	▲	mikeocool 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The fact that they didn’t make STRICT default is really a shame. I understand maintaining backwards compatibility, but the non-strict behavior is just so insane I have a hard time imagine it doesn’t bite most developers who use SQLite at some point.

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Kerrick an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's becoming so! Rails devs are starting to ship SQLite to production. It's not just for their main database either... it's replacing Redis for them, too.

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jerf 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't SQLite a de facto standard? Seems like it to me. If I want an embedded SQL engine, it is the "nobody got fired for selecting" choice. A competitor needs to offer something very compelling to unseat it.

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jstummbillig 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean as in: Most web stacks do not default to sqlite over MySQL or postgres. Why not? Best default for most users, apparently.

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conradkay 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think in the past it was more obvious. Rails switched to SQLite as the default somewhat recently

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jstummbillig 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's the one prominent example but, like you said, also just rather recently. Since "the network is slow, duh" has always been true, I wonder why.

	▲	conradkay an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My guess would be that performance improvements (mostly hardware from Moore's law and the proliferation of SSDs, but also SQLite itself) have led to far fewer websites needing to run on more than 1 computer, and most are fine on a $5/month VPS And stuff like https://litestream.io/ or SQLite adding STRICT mode
	▲	Kerrick an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It took a lot: https://fractaledmind.com/2023/12/23/rubyconftw/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39835496

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skrebbel 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I haven't investigated this so I might be behind the times, but last I checked remotely managing an SQLite database, or having some sort of dashboarding tool run management reporting queries and the likes, or make a Retool app for it, was very messy. The benefit of not being networked becomes a downside.

Maybe this has been solved though? Anybody here running a serious backend-heavy app with SQLite in production and can share? How do you remotely edit data, do analytics queries etc on production data?

	▲	Sammi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My best answer so far is ssh and sqlite3 cli.

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Cthulhu_ 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is for use cases like local application storage, but it doesn't do well in (or isn't designed for) concurrent use cases like any networked services. SQLite is not like the other databases.

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dahart 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Partly for the same reason it’s fast for small sites. In their words: “SQLite is not client/server”