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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Very nice! I'm in the middle of writing a book based on SQLite (the overall topic is data analysis with SQL, but SQLite is the medium) while I'm teaching it to students. I used to teach MySQL but it was just so goddamned hard to get it configured correctly on people's computers (I always hated when work had to be done on pre-configured computers lab rather than my own laptop), nevermind the server/client/daemon aspects of MySQL and other variants. While SQLite lacks polished (and free) GUIs, it's easier to explain on a sysops level (with sqlite files being similar to XLS files) without burying students in irrelevant tech details on the way to learning the power of SQL queries.

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Have you tried sqlitebrowser? It's fantastic, I use it a lot.

http://sqlitebrowser.org

Yep, that's what I use. Because it is open-source and cross-platform -- not to mention, pretty high quality -- it has significantly increased the attractiveness of teaching SQLite. Previously, me and other SQLite teachers I knew would point students to the SQLite Manager plugin for Firefox, which is also free and open source, but a bit clunkier: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manage...

The DB Browser (they changed it from sqlitebrowser at the request of sqlite IIRC) also has in my experience, a very helpful and responsive dev team: https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/issues

> ... also has in my experience, a very helpful and responsive dev team.

Thanks. We definitely try. :D

Thank you. :)

(I'm one of the dev's on that project)

I suppose you are using SQLite as a tool to teach analysis so this is probably not a big issue.

But I really disliked that my database teacher decided to use MySQL to teach about databases (that was about 10 years ago).

Several times he would talk about specific concept, then mention that MySQL doesn't have it (like CHECK constraint, enforcing foreign constraints, aborting statements through triggers (emulated by throwing exception) etc). If we are going to learn universal database concepts, why not use database that supports them. I personally learn things better when I can try runs out and see how they work.

Sorry for my rant, it just reminded me about that.

I'm of course not suggesting you switch back to MySQL, but distributing preconfigured MySQL docker images perhaps might've helped with your configuration troubles.

This kind of use docker comment is being left on most threads to do with setup issues.

So you are advocating people who have issues with simple apt-get or yum install mysql or <app> to instead install docker and deal with the complexity of docker, before they can use the app?

It really depends on the use-case, though I'll concede that docker would've been overkill for the parent based on their comment below.

Maybe now, but it didn't seem feasible in 2014, or at least I just wasn't familiar enough with it at that point. In any case, this was a humanities class, and I wanted to keep the tech as straightforward as possible.

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