The answer to that being running it on top of LiteFS or LiteStream seems like starts to make the setup a lot less simple and lot less battle tested, which kind of starts to negate the advantages over just running Postgres.
Another downside is that it will take time to make it look nice.
- Column definitions aren't able to be changed with something like `alter column` after creation. To change a column definition you have to manually update the underlying schema using the `writable_schema` pragma. If you mess this up you can be left with a corrupt database.
- Column types are pretty limited. This isn't too much of an issue in practice since you can handle this somewhat in application code, but it can still be a bit annoying at times.
- You have limited options for dealing with schema migrations. You basically either copy the migrations to the server and run it there (manually or with something like Ansible), or you run the migrations in your application on startup. Ideally you'd perform your schema migrations separately from your application, and having to somehow copy/get the migrations to your server to then run the migration is a bit clunky.
All 3 of these are handled in a more powerful (and not local-only) database, and so I don't get why someone would choose SQLite except for prototyping (or places like the browser or phone apps) where performance concerns aren't really relevant.
https://www.sqlite.org/lang_altertable.html
On Go you can embed your migrations in your binary:
https://oscarforner.com/blog/2023-10-10-go-embed-for-migrati...
I see the migration argument come up a lot. But, in practice with sqlite you'll be using projections where you have a source of truth database (event log) and project off it into disposable/expendable sqlite databases. So schema changes are often just delete and rebuild the projection.
I don’t think that’s really a positive or negative.
And the point about migrations ideally being separate is really just your own opinion. I prefer having the database definition in the same source tree as the application, ideally just a .sql file in the project.
After that you won't be able to change column to NOT NULL. You would need migration to create new table with not null column, copy everything, drop old table and rename the new one.
Edit: unless the table is empty.
Why is that the ideal? With SQLite your database is 1:1 connected to your application (meaning there is no other application using that database), it doesn't make sense to move the app to a new version but not the database or vice versa. Running migrations on startup of the app is ideal.
Migrations are a bit more difficult to write for SQLite than they need to be (DROP column only being added recently...), though. I usually iterate a few times to get the column definitions just right so that I don't have to change them later.
As you say column types are limited (and enforcement lax) but in practice it's a non-issue because you convert the data to application-specific types when reading from db (and enforce by writing only right data types) anyway.
I don't think this solves the issue though. To be fair, I was a bit loose with my wording and the principle is actually "don't make backwards breaking changes to your database schema" rather than "do your migrations separately", but if you do them separately it is a good way to enforce it. The issue you want to prevent is your application having bugs/issues in production necessitating a rollback, and your now rolled back application doing things that are incompatible with the current database version (or in a concurrent setting, that some applications may not be updated).
There's still the issue where you're copying over all of the migrations to your server too when you do it in the application, which is in my opinion something you are ideally able to avoid, but it's not a problem in practice until you have 1000s of migrations.
Or at least that's how I view it. Whenever I think about using SQLite, I make sure I read these documents to see if I am fine with the limitations.
No you don’t [0]. It is less convenient than being able to directly alter columns, but you do not need to mess around with writable schemas or risk corruption.
If you're saying "do this, get that", you should be able explain how to measure and reproduce that result.
The answer to why someone might choose SQLite in production could be latency but if it is then prove it's worth the trade-offs.
> To ensure write operations don't suffer from disk synchronization bottlenecks, pair WAL mode with the following pragma
Only do this if you are prepared to sacrifice durability (i.e can afford to lose transactions).
That being said it can be done and it's pretty normal for mobile apps, desktop apps etc. You just have to make sure the migrations are run when the tenant connects/unlocks/runs the app - and make sure that you minimise the risk of it going wrong!
I don't think it scales when you have unbounded amounts of tenants.
https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/Database-driver-SQLite/#rem...
For the rare case when you do rollback the safest thing to do is stop the app, downgrade the db (by running some sql if necessary) and app and rerun it. Not that different in postgres no?
This is again a scenario I’ve never run into 20ish years of SQL.