The only way that works is if the dev team is large enough to be responsive to business needs, which almost never happens because devs are expensive. The juniors who are tweaking business logic every day are functionally doing a role analysts can do if you just give them a sane API and data tools.

if the unfortunate bus incident happens to sqlite developers, there is exactly ZERO chance that it will not be very well maintained on the count of all the users, many of whom already have support contracts going for decades, and which would require the same level of support they have already enjoyed.

In practice, every OS has its preferred system and the rest has varying levels of "I guess this works", with FAT32 and exFAT being the only real cross-platform options.

To wit:

* NTFS is only really properly and fully supported on Windows. Apple mounts it read-only. Linux can certainly mount NTFS and do some basic reads and writes. Unfortunately for whatever reason, the Linux fsck tools for NTFS are absolutely terrible, poorly designed and generally can't fix even the most basic of issues. At the same time, mount refuses to work with a partially corrupted filesystem, so if you're dealing with dirty unmounts (where the worst case usually is some unclosed file handle rather than data loss, but this also happens if you try to mount a suspended Windows parititon, which isn't uncommon since Windows hibernates by default and calls it fast boot), that's a boot to Windows just to fix it.

* Apple filesystems basically only work on apple devices. It's technically possible to mount them on Linux, but you end up digging into the guts of a bunch of stuff that Apple usually just masks for you.

* ext4 is only properly read/write under Linux and requires external drivers under Windows (which may not work properly either, as corruption issues are common).

FAT32 is reliable in that any OS can fsck/chkdsk it and properly mount it without needing special drivers, but is hindered by ancient filesize limitations. exFAT, at least for most cases, is the only filesystem you can plug into most devices and expect more or less the same capabilities as FAT32 (read/write support, can fix filesystem corruption.)

Out of the os specific ones, NTFS seems like it has the most potential to be the one filesystem that works everywhere; it's modern, works good-ish on most devices, it's just that the fsck/chkdsk tooling is awful outside of Windows.

"Batch writer pattern" is a good idea to get rid of expensive commits.

ex: main.db + fts.db. reading and writing to main.db is always available; updating the fts index can be done without blocking the main database — it only needs to read, the reads can be chunked, and delayed. fts.db keeps the index + a cursor table — an id or last change ts

could also use a shard to handle tables for metrics, or simply move old data out of main.db

* some examples:

  conn = sqlite3.connect("data.db")
  conn.execute("PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL")        # concurrent reads (see above)
  conn.execute("PRAGMA synchronous=NORMAL")      # fsync at checkpoint, not every commit
  conn.execute("PRAGMA cache_size=-62500")       # ~61 MB page cache (negative = KB)
  conn.execute("PRAGMA temp_store=MEMORY")       # temp tables and indexes in RAM
  conn.execute("PRAGMA busy_timeout=5000")       # wait 5s on lock instead of failing

my replies are being ratelimited, so let me add this

the heavy duty server other databases have is doing that load bearing work that folks tend to complain about sqlite can't do

the real dmbs's are doing mostly the same work that sqlite does, you just don't have to think about it once they're set up. behind that chunky server process the database is still dealing with writing your data to a filesystem, handling transaction locks, etc.

by default sqlite gives you a stable database file, that when you see the transaction complete, it means the changes have been committed to storage, and cannot be lost if the machine were to crash exactly after that.

you can decide to wave some, or all of those guaranties in exchange for performance, and this doesn't even have to be an all or nothing situation.

When i actually have something that requires multi nodes, i just use postgres (with replica) or mongo (with replica).

But it's for those apps which are in autoscaler.

For bulk data refresh I use build artifact and hotreload memort mapped files, by checking a manifest on object storage then only getting update if newer.

I've used this pattern everywhere and never really needed anything more, occasionally i might use redis if something required shared state across multiple nodes and fast.

For that matter if you write your system with the correct abstraction you can switch to Postgres _later_ if it becomes necessary. For every system that really did need to scale 10,000 are pointlessly overbuilt - worrying about scale when it just didn't matter.

(Hint: whatever your answer is it'll apply to SQLite too)

[0]: https://7-zip.org/7z.html

[1]: CVE-2025-0411

We should really consider eventually retiring memes because they just end up as thought-terminating cliches.

This is of course referring to xkcd #927. How do I know that?

Not everything needs to be real-time updated.

This is indeed not an optimal setup. A more careful design from first principles would not require seeking around the file as much as SQLite does, we'd do a better job on reading exactly the correct range of bytes for a given query since we know ahead of time what the access patterns are, and we could do reads in parallel. With SQLite we have to be very careful about the schema design to ensure it won't have to seek too many times to answer a query. But SQLite was expedient, and I'm confident I'll always be able to read the files. That's less certain for a custom file format.

https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured...

SQLite has supported all types of joins since version 3.39 in 2022.

SQLite is 1.2mb in combined wasm and JavaScript and not really designed for my use case, so I would have to add all the things i need anyway like compression and HTML tag insertion. For my use case which is just for pwas SQLite takes too long to load and the files are too big and the search isn't tailored. So I made something else in 38kb instead

Instead of doing multiple columns, there's some of that with secondary and tertiary indexes, but mostly it's just key value.

To make the data more relational I find it's more natural to just have additional "columns" in separate peak files and when the peak files are queried they can be combined by headword. This is kinda like what parquet does putting all of one column together.

I could make PeakSlab have columns and have it query based off specific columns fairly easily, but it was a design decision to make things more tag based and less column based. I like that it's more flexible and less rigid in structure.

SQLite keeps everything relational and their raw filesizes are 50% larger than a .peak file, not sure what's exactly to blame, but I'm optimizing for small filesizes.

You can't precompile your SQL at build time, unfortunately, but you _can_ precompile all your SQL at the very start of your program and then never touch the parser again. This might be a good middle ground for you. It is infra that you can centralize, write some unit tests against, and then not worry about forever.

It's not common because the SQLite parser is lightning fast and it's so convenient to just write out a new query as you need one, versus having one bucket of all queries. But it's an option!

If your objection is to the SQL language itself then you might find Datalog interesting. Datalog is a logic-based language where you query by writing predicates rather than writing SQL statements. Check out Logica <https://logica.dev>. It's a language in the Datalog family that compiles to SQL.

In both cases, SQL is used only as a low-level IR for interfacing with the database engine.

Do you only use graphical programming languages or how is your "programmatic logic" typically expressed?