And LMDB beats the crap out of SQLite, in any mode. http://www.lmdb.tech/bench/microbench/
Replacing SQLite's Btree engine with LMDB makes the SQLite footprint smaller, faster, and more reliable too. https://github.com/LMDB/sqlightning
Alright, I went through this page to see why my experience is different. While it mentions that they enabled SQLite's WAL journal, it also mentions that the synchronous writes were performed with PRAGMA synchronous=FULL.
I believe that if they set PRAGMA synchronous=NORMAL, they will get an ACI-reliable database that is way faster than LMDB with write-to-disk workloads.
Most of the measurements on that page are not really useful to me; they do not persist the data (db on tmpfs) or they do not care about reliability, using dangerous settings. Only few measurements are both persisting the data and writing safely, but the SQLite configuration is sub-optimal for them.
For my purposes as an application developer, I care about comparing databases operating in safe mode i.e. a system crash should never cause total data loss. According to my experience SQLite's safe mode is many times faster than LMDB's safe mode, with a write workload. While LMDB is thrashing the disk and achieves only a handful of write transactions per second.
https://wisdom.cs.wisc.edu/workshops/spring-14/talks/Thanu.p...
LMDB is not.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14...