[metadat]

This is the first I've heard of SQLite JOIN performance being "weak". I just spent 10 minutes scouring the annals of the web and didn't turn up anything relevant. Are there any additional links or other information you can share about this claim?

Edit: @akira2501: SQLite comes with different tradeoffs, sometimes superior and other times less so, depending on the use case. Blanket statements without evidence are unproductive in progressing the conversation..

[Groxx]

Weeellll... I think it's safe to say SQLite's planner is simple, and trends towards "you get what you wrote" rather than having more sophisticated runtime monitoring and adjusting.

But as with all things SQLite, the answer is generally "it's easy to predict so just improve your query" and/or "there's a plugin for that" so it tends to win in the end with a bit of care.

[thesz]

https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner-ng.html

SQLite's planner is anything but simple. It has a beam search over different plans, basically, it approximates full NP-hard solution search process using bounded space and time.

[akira2501]

Seriously?

https://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html

Chapter 2. Chapter 7. Chapter 8.

It should be _zero_ surprise to you that SQLite is not as powerful as other full database query engines.

[simonw]

I don’t understand how reading that documentation page makes it clear that other relational engines have better performance for joins.

[anacrolix]

I'm with you. I've encountered numerous situations where the query planner caused issues. I don't know if the alternatives are better, but it's definitely an issue. I've written multiple databases wrapping SQLite, and multiple bindings to SQLite. There are dragons.

[vrighter]

I had to use sqlite once for something that would do a ton of read queries on a particular table. Sometimes just swapping the order of operands to an and operation generated a completely different query plan. Had to scour their optimizer document and painstakingly check the query plans of, and then manually tune, each sql statement.

But then it was quite fast.