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by rpdillon 26 days ago
Sqlite is good for lots of stuff, but you're probably focusing your days on high-scale webapps that want sharding with networked DBs. That's one domain, and an interesting one, but there are lots of others.

I'm a big fan of re-evaluating prior "best practices" in light of technology changes, especially in ways that improve simplicity. Running my family's social media site off a single sqlite DB on a VPS is great. ~15 users, almost zero maintenance. I run my FreshRSS instance off of sqlite, as well as my "now" page. At work, I used sqlite for all kinds of things over the past decades: as an ad hoc job queue, as a quick way to ingest and query lots of logs locally, and present/filter in realtime with simonw's excellent https://github.com/simonw/datasette.

I don't think it's every "sqlite for everything" as much as it is "sqlite in lots of places you probably didn't think to apply it."

kentonv/Cloudflare's work on sqlite at the edge might have made this thinking a bit more popular, but it was always around. https://blog.cloudflare.com/sqlite-in-durable-objects/

I suspect being aware of all those little neat cases and wanting to leverage sqlite for them may be an indicator of experience, rather than the opposite.
1 comments
droidjj 26 days ago
> Running my family's social media site off a single sqlite DB on a VPS is great. ~15 users, almost zero maintenance.

Details, please!

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rpdillon 25 days ago
Nothing public at the moment, unfortunately. I was kind of surprised at the lack of Very Simple scripts to just host a site for a handful of users easily. So I wrote one that focuses on:

    Unlimited-length posts in a chronological feed. You don't have to subscribe to everyone - having something appear in your feed is opt-in.
    Circles. Subscribing to someone into a hobby can get noisy. Circles give the hobby a place, for those that want to check.
    RSS everywhere: Anyone can add an RSS feed to the server, and anyone can view all the subscribed feeds and choose which to follow. They are not part of the home feed, but a separate section. Every feed (circle, user) has a public-to-the-internet feed and a private-to-folks-on-the-server feed.
    Mentions: you can @-mention anyone on the server to get a post into their home feed.
    Public posts: by default, every post is private. If a user checks a box, the post will be made public, so folks that are not logged in can see it.
    Posts in the feeds section, circles section, or home section can be replied to, with the user choosing where to share (a circle, or their feed)
    It's all a single-file Python script that can run in either CGI mode or server mode. I compile it with nuitka and run it as a CGI behind Apache. Very old school, works fine. Non-attachment data stored in sqlite, so if you have the DB, you can fire up a copy of the site, sans attachments.
    Attachments: gallery posts supported, with lightbox viewing. PDFs supported. Nothing else right now.
    Works on mobile.
    No email or other form of notifications. If users visit, they see stuff. If they don't, they don't.
    Super-opinionated: admin controls everything, and password resets go through the admin, who simply asks the server to regenerate a new password, that the admin then passes along to the user.
    There are no direct messages, or private posts, in the sense that if you log in, you'll be able to see everything going on if you click through to it.
    Replies, comments, and reactions are supported. Conversation view (tree of posts replying to each other) is supported.
Those are the features off the top of my head. It's a social network for small groups that are high-trust. If I open source it (after I feel it is more airtight) I'll probably ask AI to provide a landing page using this as a prompt and provide this verbatim at the top of that page for folks that want the zero-bullshit version. =)
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