[jtakkala]

I gained a newfound respect for SQLite recently after reading Dan Luu's post on file consistency (http://danluu.com/file-consistency/). I had always thought of SQLite as a bit of a toy database, but having read that post I was surprised by how rigorously it appears to have been developed.

[corysama]

Reading that post makes me want to investigate LMDB as an alternative "competition for fopen()". I'd be very interested if anyone had opinions/experience on that idea.

[hyc_symas]

(Disclaimer: LMDB author here) When your data is simple, too simple for SQL, LMDB is the rational choice. (And as others have already pointed out, you can use SQLightning, SQLite built on LMDB, if you really want the relational data model.)

Nothing else even approaches LMDB for small footprint, efficiency, and reliability.