[Moto7451]

I had great success using SQLite as the backing store for fast sharing and reindexing of a domain specific search engine component my company licensed. Before we developed our own algorithms and moved to Elasticsearch I was playing with augmenting the licensed component with the full text search capabilities of SQLite. The whole thing ended up being shuffled around via Gluster so I was able to offload the responsibility for sharing shards to it.

My experience pretty much matched what you describe and it was such a great opportunity to really lean on a fabulous piece of software. Given this was many years ago, before ES was stable and SOLR wasn't working well for us, I think it was the right choice. These days, ES is good enough that if I had to do it all over I'd go straight to it. None the less, I don't think SQLite should be ignored as an option when you have high levels of control over data access patterns.