SQLite is not a toy database
added on 2022/08/19 @ 13:01:59 | 2589 views| category: programming

Whether you are a developer, data analyst, QA engineer, DevOps person, or product manager - SQLite is a perfect tool for you. Here is why.

A few well-known facts to get started:
- SQLite is the most common DBMS in the world, shipped with all popular operating systems.
- SQLite is serverless.
- For developers, SQLite is embedded directly into the app.
- For everyone else, there is a convenient database console (REPL),
provided as a single file (sqlite3.exe on Windows, sqlite3 on Linux / macOS).

SQLite works with hundreds of millions of records just fine. Regular INSERTs show about 240K records per second on my laptop. And if you connect the CSV file as a virtual table (there is an extension for that) - inserts become 2 times faster.

There is a popular opinion among developers that SQLite is not suitable for the web, because it doesn’t support concurrent access. This is a myth. In the write-ahead log mode (available since long ago), there can be as many concurrent readers as you want. There can be only one concurrent writer, but often one is enough.

SQLite is a perfect fit for small websites and applications. sqlite.org uses SQLite as a database, not bothering with optimization (≈200 requests per page). It handles 700K visits per month and serves pages faster than 95% of websites I’ve seen.