I avoided DBs like the plague early in my career, in favor of serialized formats on disk. I still think there's a lot of merit to that, but at this point in my career I see a lot more use case for sqlite and the relational features it comes with. At the least, I've spent a lot less time chasing down data corruption bugs since changing philosophy.

Now that said, if there's value to the "database" being human readable/editable, json is still well worth a consideration. Dealing with even sqlite is a pain in the ass when you just need to tweak or read something, especially if you're not the dev.

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giva 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Dealing with even sqlite is a pain in the ass when you just need to tweak or read something, especially if you're not the dev.

How? With SQL is super easy to search, compare, and update data. That's what it’s built for.

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freedomben 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Pain in the ass was way too strong, I retract that. Mainly I meant relative. For example `nvim <filename>.json` and then /search for what I want, versus tracking down the sqlite file, opening, examining the schema, figuring out where the most likely place is that I care about, writing a SQL statement to query, etc.

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giva 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, you still need to track down the <filename> part and knowing what you want to search, so you need to examine the schema anyway.

However, if your all application state can be represented in a single json file of less than a dozen MB, yes, a database can be overkill.

	▲	freedomben 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Well, you still need to track down the <filename> part and knowing what you want to search, so you need to examine the schema anyway. Yes agreed, but it's usually a lot easier to find the filename part, especially if the application follows XDG. Sqlite databases are usually buried somewhere because they aren't expected to be looked at.

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the_pwner224 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SqliteBrowser will let you open up your tables in an Excel-type view. You can also edit directly from the GUI. Still not as frictionless as a plain text file, and I'm not sure how good the search functionality is, but it lets you skip having to write any SQL.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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