Perfect summary. I'll add: insane defaults that'll catch you unaware if you're not careful! Like foreign keys being opt-in; sure, it'll create 'em, but it won't enforce them by default!
Always send "pragma foreign_keys=on" first thing after opening the db.
Some of the types sloppiness can be worked around by declaring tables to be STRICT. You can also add CHECK constraints that a column value is consistent with the underlying representation of the type -- for instance, if you're storing ip addresses in a column of type BLOB, you can add a CHECK that the blob is either 4 or 16 bytes.
The fact that they didn’t make STRICT default is really a shame.
I understand maintaining backwards compatibility, but the non-strict behavior is just so insane I have a hard time imagine it doesn’t bite most developers who use SQLite at some point.
> The fact that they didn’t make STRICT default is really a shame.
SQLite makes strong backwards-compatibility guarantees. How many apps would be broken if an Android update suddenly defaulted its internal copy of SQLite to STRICT? Or if it decided to turn on foreign keys by default?
Those are rhetorical questions. Any non-0 percentage of affected applications adds up to a big number for software with SQLite's footprint.
Software pulling the proverbial rug out from under downstream developers by making incompatible changes is one of the unfortunate evils of software development, but the SQLite project makes every effort to ensure that SQLite doesn't do any rug-tugging.
Nearly every default setting in sqlite is "wrong" from the outset, for typical use cases. I'm surprised packages that offer a sane configuration out of the box aren't more popular.
I mean it has blob types. Which basically means you can implement any type you want. You can also trivially implement custom application functions to work on these blob types in your queries. [1]
Isn't SQLite a de facto standard? Seems like it to me. If I want an embedded SQL engine, it is the "nobody got fired for selecting" choice. A competitor needs to offer something very compelling to unseat it.
Yeah, that's the one prominent example but, like you said, also just rather recently. Since "the network is slow, duh" has always been true, I wonder why.
My guess would be that performance improvements (mostly hardware from Moore's law and the proliferation of SSDs, but also SQLite itself) have led to far fewer websites needing to run on more than 1 computer, and most are fine on a $5/month VPS
I haven't investigated this so I might be behind the times, but last I checked remotely managing an SQLite database, or having some sort of dashboarding tool run management reporting queries and the likes, or make a Retool app for it, was very messy. The benefit of not being networked becomes a downside.
Maybe this has been solved though? Anybody here running a serious backend-heavy app with SQLite in production and can share? How do you remotely edit data, do analytics queries etc on production data?
It is for use cases like local application storage, but it doesn't do well in (or isn't designed for) concurrent use cases like any networked services. SQLite is not like the other databases.
It's becoming so! Rails devs are starting to ship SQLite to production. It's not just for their main database either... it's replacing Redis for them, too.