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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Is SQLite likely to be faster than postgres? In terms of ease of use / admin overhead I consider them mostly equivalent. I thought the main problem with SQLite was it was slow tih concurrent writers. Whereas the "bigger" SQL databases have code that allows concurrent writes.

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The issue with SQLite and concurrent writers isn't that it's slow, it's that it just can't do it. WAL mode lets you have as many readers as you want concurrent with a single writer, but it doesn't give you multiple concurrent writers. If you really need concurrent writes, use PostgreSQL or another RDBMS.

In my experience, SQLite is likely to be faster when you have lots of reading. Being in-process gives SQLite a natural advantage in read-heavy situations.

WAL mode is how you address this problem with SQLite.

See: https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html

"Write transactions are very fast since they only involve writing the content once (versus twice for rollback-journal transactions) and because the writes are all sequential. Further, syncing the content to the disk is not required, as long as the application is willing to sacrifice durability following a power loss or hard reboot."

As long as you don't mind volatile memory issues, that is.

I think there are a lot of places where sqlite can outperform postgres... This is read-heavy and latency-critical apps, where additional hop is costly, for example.

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