Consider SQLite
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Consider SQLite
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite
From their "code of ethics"
- First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength.
- Deny oneself in order to follow Christ.
- Fulfill not the desires of the flesh; hate your own will.
There are even more strange ones, but I hope you get the picture. Reason enough to use something else if possible.
If you actually read the page, it's intended as a tongue-in-cheek box-checker.
This document was originally called a "Code of Conduct" and was created for the purpose of filling in a box on "supplier registration" forms submitted to the SQLite developers by some clients.
This document continues to be used for its original purpose - providing a reference to fill in the "code of conduct" box on supplier registration forms.
@colonial @Sibbo I'm actually glad I did read the page itself - it's clearly satire, making fun of how "sacred" others seem to hold their codes of conduct/ethics. I'm glad I read through that - I see no problems with it or in using SQLite.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/sqlite_code_of_conduct/
They are serious about the religious stuff. And someone who kicks the concept of a code of conduct with their feet like this is surely not a person that is nice to be around.
They are serious about the religious stuff.
I fail to see how that's an issue.
Also, in the very page you linked, he clarified:
In the face of today's attention, which has included a wave of aggressive responses accusing Hipp of un-Christian behavior – he tells us he updated the preface to highlight the fact that by adopting St Benedict's rules he was not seeking to exclude anyone.
"Nobody is excluded from the SQLite community due to biological category or religious creed," he told us. "The preface to the CoC should make this clear. The only way to get kicked out of the SQLite community is by shouting, flaming, and disrespectful behavior. In 18 years, only one person has ever been banned from the mailing list."
He also said that he considered only retaining the bullet points that would be relevant to the project, but ultimately decided that would be disrespectful to the original text and its author. Seems fine to me.
He also said that he considered only retaining the bullet points that would be relevant to the project, but ultimately decided that
wouldbe[ing] disrespectful tothe original text and its author. Seems[other religions] is fineto me.
Thanks, everyone knows they have a weird coc. It obviously only applies to the maintainers/members of the project though and is more of a statement than something that is actually enforced. As a convinced atheist, I also find it pretty weird but see absolutely no reason at all to avoid sqlite because of that. What matters is: Code quality/correctness (which is absolutely superb when it comes to sqlite) and license, of course. Why would I care about the authors beliefs? They don't even directly benefit from me using their product.
In other words, the developers are saying: "We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us."
I dk I don't think you can fake a persecution complex like that.
Holy crap. I've used this thing for years and never had a clue they're a bunch of fruitcakes.
I don't know, SQLite it's something that makes sense in theory, but I think its easier for ops people to just use a proper database. If you need to move the database to a separate machine, limit permissions, etc. its just easier to do.
SQLite is great for local apps that need a structured way to store their data, but I'm not really comfortable using it for more than that.
I think its easier for ops people to just use a proper database.
SQLite is a proper database.
For single-instance deployments, running SQLite means no overhead due to a network roundtrip, and things just work.
I typically run postgres locally too (in docker), while there's still technically network overhead there's not much compared to a real network, plus you can easily move it to another machine without reworking your app to switch from SQLite to postgres.
The database in a state where it's violating some assumptions I'm making and I need to manually intervene without taking down my application for example. I need to have an audit trail on the changes being made to the database and who made them. I need to create replicas to implement failover. I need to replicate my application on multiple machines and all the replicas need to have the same view of the data. I need to mitigate the possibility of data leaks if I have multiple tenants sharing a database.
I'm not saying that you're wrong for using it. I'm just saying that it doesn't work for everything.
Sorry about that, it seems I unintentionally created a bit of controversy and am being a bit defensive.
Personally I never do permissions at the database layer anyway - it's always done at the application layer.
I also never move the database to a separate server - that adds too much latency. If your database is local, and "hot" tables are cached in RAM, you can do several hundred thousand queries in a split second and having performance like that can drastically reduce complexity in your business logic (and therefore, drastically reduce bugs).
Regardless, I don't see it as something that is the silver bullet that people make it out to be. Being able to introspect the production database, query it, and generally have a set of tools to properly manage your data as opposed to having everything in a file fully managed by your application is something useful for me that you lose with SQLite.
I'm not sure I understand your point? You can connect to and run queries/etc on the production database in SQLite.
I'm not really advocating for using SQLite by the way - I've only ever used it on smartphone apps myself where a full database wouldn't even have enough RAM to run at all. I'm just pointing out that permissions isn't a feature I've ever found useful.
For example, say I have an invoice table that is written to whenever a customer buys a product. Customers need to have write access to the table in the database. But I don't want them to be able to write anything they want - there needs to be severe restrictions on what can be written, and those have to be done outside of the database.
Since you have to do some of your permissions outside the database, it's more reliable to just do all of them there. Splitting things up with half your security in one place and half in another is asking for bugs.
The main reason I would avoid SQLite is the backup system, which essentially takes your whole database offline (for write access anyway) while the backup is running. That's just not good enough once the database reaches a size where backups take more than a moment. But if you're not storing much data, or not doing many writes, that's a non-issue.
SQLite definitely has advantages. It's often extremely fast for example. The lack of complex features removes performance bottlenecks all of the place and you can do millions of basic select queries per second in SQLite. Obviously not every query is that fast, but a lot of them are especially if you design your indexes/etc properly.
Definitely not a silver bullet, but I do think anyone who writes code that reads or writes data should be at least aware of the basic capabilities of SQLite. It's free. It's reliable. It runs literally on any platform (you can even run it client side in a webpage these days). So the only reason to avoid SQLite is if it's the wrong tool for the job. And you can't make that judgement call unless you have experience with it.
SQLite should be in every developer's toolchain, even if you don't have a use for it right now.
It's useful for audit trails and the like, generally OS audit logs only tell you who accessed the machine not what they did on the production database. Things like that. Databases like postgres come with admin tooling in general that SQLite isn't really meant for. As you said, backups as well are a problem.
I've built and deployed specifically small applications using sqlite and yeah I agree with everything, but especially the migration pains. Any change becomes difficult and bringing another developer onto a project just slows it to a crawl when db changes are needed. If that can be resolved I could be convinced, but until them postgres4lyf
From the article:
There are a few legitimate downsides to using SQLite. First off, the type system. It's bad. Luckily, as of a month ago, you can use strict typing instead, which somewhat improves the situation.
That's a terribly weak argument. No details, no rationale, not objective evidence, no insightz nothing. "It's bad." That's the full extent of the analysis.
Quite weak.
SQLite's type system could accurately be described as "there is no type system". And the developers consider it a feature not a bug.
A recently added "STRICT" feature changes that. But it's very rudimentary.
I use SQLite to power up lots of stuff I'm working on. It's lightweight, fast, simple and well-documented for small projects — like a Postgres but very local. Saves me from having to deal with containers "just to store data", let alone for moving stuff to other machine where I would also need the permissions to configure and run containers in the first place; whereas all you need to pass SQLite databases along is scp / rsync.
I love SQLite! My current project actually uses it to serve read-only web content - it's plenty fast, and it's really nice having everything baked into the executable. No need to juggle a separate database server.
Their docs are also superb - maybe I'm weird, but I like reading about stuff like atomic commit.
I love SQLite in the command line. Being able to import data sets into a db that I can quickly write queries for has saved me a lot of data processing time.
The CSV import tool is so useful too. I’ll find myself looking at an excel sheet or something and thinking “if only I could query this like SQL”.
Yes, exactly! I just import the data into SQLite as an in memory db, execute whatever query I want and .output the answer somewhere. It's so easy and clean.
It's an interesting format for passing around information that's best structured as a database, thus useful for one of my current spare-time projects.
it uses a single file on disk as a backing store
While this is the norm, you can have one database in multiple files.
Also, provides benchmarks on a file-based database whithout providing any details on the underlying filesystem.
... you know you can put SQLite in a container right? It doesn't even need to be persisted to disk - it can just live in RAM.
Other databases have the same issue, try having multiple database containers (without massive speed losses). If application is bound by the performance of the front end, this is a problem, but those really are not what SQLite was intended for.
In the case of database bound applications, SQLite is just as good as any other database, which despite having a client server model can typically only handle a single operation at once.
You misunderstood. I'm not talking about scaling the DB horizontally, I'm talking about scaling the application using the DB horizontally.