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Comment by PirateBay | Hacker News Reader

Projects like this(sparsely documented, tiny) always seem to be just internal tools that the company just threw out into the world just because they can. Not that I'm ungrateful, but without any sort of explanation as to why I'd use this over a clustered MySQL or Postgres it's a little hard to make heads or tails about whether I should care.

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It's work someone else did and shared with you for free. It strikes me as lazy to complain about how you don't know what to do with it and want everything spoon-fed to you. It's go+sqlite+raft. That means it's an embedded database for Go that can be used across a cluster of Go processes while maintaining ACID goodness. I got that out of it in 2 minutes of looking at the readme, I think you could manage the same if you take the time it took you here to make a new account and comment.

I don't ever remember complaining, just saying I have no idea what it's even useful for. This is usually where a good, comprehensive, thoughtful readme helps people figure out why they should care about a project over others that do the same thing and what sets it apart. But I guess expecting explanations for libraries is spoonfeeding. Oh well!

I'm working towards a 1.0 release. At that point documentation will be more complete and the plumbing needed to use it in an app should be also reduced.

I think the best explanation of why you'd use it over PG or MySQL is the same as why you'd use SQLite over them:

https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

With dqlite you also get HA, fault-tolerance and transparent failover, if you're willing to trade it with a bit of performance.

It looks like a dependency of lxd, the successor to lxc, which is being developed by Canonical (of Ubuntu fame). You can see how they're using it in https://github.com/lxc/lxd/tree/master/lxd/cluster.

Dqlite and rqlite are not in the same space as postgres and mysql, they're more comparable to tools like Zookeeper, etcd, or Consul[0] - low throughput CP data stores that are generally used for coordinating distributed systems. In this case, it saves users from having to manage an external data store to run lxd clustered.

[0] in fact, dqlite uses the same raft implementation as Consul, which is cool

Just what the world needs, yet another would-you-like-my-version-of-clustering-with-that virtual environments tool...

Hopefully someone more acquainted with the ecosystem can respond, but docker is built on lxc, and it appears that the intention of lxd is to do something similar - provide a low-level tool for docker and related tools to use, with some extra tools and security guarantees.

You would probably integrate this into a self contained application binary.

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