Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ok_dad 1388 days ago
With SQLite, though, you could reasonably just skip doing fancy joins and do everything in tiny queries in tight loops because SQLite is literally embedded in your app’s code. You can be careless with SQLite in ways you cannot with a monolithic database server because of that reason. I still agree there are use cases where a centralized database is better, but SQLite is a strange beast that needs a special diet to perform best.
1 comments

Sometimes. This is only universally true if your datasets are tiny and your access patterns are simple. Moving a shitty suboptimal O(n^2) or worse algorithm locally when something linear or better is possible is going to hurt no matter where the DB is.

> but SQLite is a strange beast that needs a special diet to perform best.

I don’t see what is strange about it - for large datasets it’s the same complexity issues as anywhere else.

Not sure specifically what your comment is trying to add, since I acknowledged the type of use case SQLite excels in - those where roundtripping are a dominating cost and “k-v” stores, ie simple queries. My entire point is that those are a common but still niche use case.