🔗 Siren Call of SQLite on the Server

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day.

One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts on how they enable server-side SQLite:

1. I’m All-In on Server-Side SQLite - Ben Johnson, the author of BoltDB, joins Fly to work on Litestream, a SQLite replication solution.

2. Introducing LiteFS - The introduction of LiteFS, which is a FUSE file system designed to replicate SQLite transactions over the network.

3. LiteFS Cloud: Distributed SQLite with Managed Backups - Introducing backups and restores for LiteFS.

There is the occasional question on the internet about using SQLite server-side. And a solid blog post, Consider SQLite, by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, on the topic.

The SQLite project has been pretty clear on its goal. It is not to be a client/server database alternative, it’s to be an ad-hoc application data file alternative. But it is software and with a bit of hard work, you can make software do amazing things.

SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().

The thing is…​just don’t run SQLite server-side in production. Unless you have a really good reason.