There is some risk that, if you design your website to use a local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine), then switching later to a networked database is harder. In other words, once you design a system to do 200 queries per page, you’d essentially have to redesign the whole thing to switch later.

It seems like it mostly comes down to how likely it is that the site will grow large enough to need a networked database. And people probably wildly overestimate this. HackerNews, for example, runs on a single computer.

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andersmurphy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is sqlite can scale further vertically than most network databases. In some context's like writes and interactive transactions it outright scales further. [1]

That's before you even get into sharding sqlite.

[1] - https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...

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itopaloglu83 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of us, majority of the time, don’t need that level of optimization, because not every project is destined to grow 10x quickly.

LLM also has this tendency of premature optimization where they start to write very complex classes for users who only want to extract some information just to resolve a quick problem.

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63stack 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't see how anyone would design a system that executes 200 queries per page. I understand having a system that is ín use for many many years and accumulates a lot of legacy code eventually ends up there, but designing? Never. That's not design, that's doing a bad job at design.

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ctxc 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds a bit like me, reading the comments before the article!

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9rx 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't see how anyone would design a system that executes 200 queries per page.

They call it the n+1 problem. 200 queries is the theoretically correct approach, but due to high network latency of networked DMBSes you have to hack around it. But if the overhead is low, like when using SQLite, then you would not introduce hacks in the first place.

The parent is saying that if you correctly design your application, but then move to system that requires hacks to deal with its real-world shortcomings, that you won't be prepared. Although I think that's a major overstatement. If you have correctly designed the rest of your application too, introducing the necessary hacks into a couple of isolated places is really not a big deal at all.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd point to the difference between vector-based vs scalar-based systems in numerics. If your web programming language is more like MATLAB or APL than PHP than maybe it can naturally generate the code to do it all with sets. As it is we are usually writing set-based implementations in scalar-based languages.

Part of the "object-relational mapping" problem has always been that SQL is superior to conventional programming languages in many ways.

	▲	9rx 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course, the "object-relational mapping" problem is simply that of latency. In the theoretical world where latency isn't a thing, there is no such thing as the "object-relational mapping" problem. In the real world where you have something like SQLite, it isn't a practical problem either. SQL was originally designed to run on the same machine as the user, so it was never envisioned as a problem. It wasn't until Oracle decided to slap networking protocols on top of an SQL engine did it become one. Unfortunately, they should have exposed a language more conducive to the limitations of the network, performing the mapping in the same place as the database. But, such is the life of commercial computing. Oracle has that now, it was just several decades too late, and by that time everyone else had copied their bad ideas.

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anamexis 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you read the OP?

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

There's also the alternative of having a cluster with one local DB in each node

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direwolf20 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Then you have massive synchronization problems if your data isn't almost read–only.

	▲	Gabrys1 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		if your data isn't mostly read-only, then you're going to have an issue with SQLite. It doesn't nicely support parallel writers
	▲	CuriouslyC 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not if you're sharding correctly.

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luckylion 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The same is true for regular databases though, isn't it?

Network adds latency and while it might be fine to run 500 queries with the database being on the same machine, adding 1-5ms per query makes it feel not okay.

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magicalhippo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> adding 1-5ms per query makes it feel not okay

Or going from ~1ms over a local wired network to ~10ms over a wireless network.

Had a customer performance complaint that boiled down to that, something that should take minutes took hours. Could not reproduce it internally.

After a lot of back abd forth I asked if the user machine was wired. Nope, wireless laptop. Got them to plug in like their colleagues and it was fast again.

	▲	fwip 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you have the ability to batch that communication, you could probably get those minutes down to seconds.

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cyanmagenta 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, that is why I said “local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine).”

This isn’t an sqlite-specific point, although sqlite often runs faster on a single machine because local sockets have some overhead.