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Comment by norom | Hacker News Reader

I for one am enjoying this. Sure they could probably just use a regular ol' database, but where is the excitement in that!

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sqlite is, like, the regular-est of the databases.

Not quite, I got bitten by weak type system more than once.

Funny in here, people praise SQLite but dismiss MySQL when it's tiny bit off the SQL standard and people complain how PHP converts values with best effort guess on different types but not when SQLite does that too.

Don't know why anyone would use SQLite in production except for as some KV store embedded in an app.

Because an SQL engine that defers control over connections, concurrency, storage, and process management to users is extremely valuable for multiple reasons, including simple cases like caches where you'd ordinarily just store things in flat files or BerkleyDB-style database, and complex cases like distributed statekeeping where existing SQL databases aren't going to do anything close to the right thing for your application, but you also don't want to reinvent SQL and query planning and write-ahead-logs to build your complex database.

The vibe I get from this thread is that a lot of people have only experienced SQLite from the vantage point of something like Rails running in a "test" environment, and are used to explaining to people on some PHPbb somewhere that you can't really use SQLite to back a multiuser SAAS app. That's as may be, but when you're building infra components, you control who the "users" are; not everything is a web server taking requests from all comers.

Adding to what tptacek said, it seems you're also out of date with SQLite, they added strict typing recently.

Enough people have had this complaint that sqlite has added STRICT tables: https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html

Oh, finally! I haven't heard about it. Thank you!

there is a strict mode https://sqlite.org/src/wiki?name=StrictMode

SQLite is the most deployed database in the world

Not for this kind of applications. Same as Java being on 13 billion of devices, it doesn't mean anything if it's some config store underneath some mobile or desktop app.

> some config store underneath some mobile or desktop app

Do you understand what kind of application Tailscale is? For all intents and purposes it's exactly what you described above.

Excitement is only for people who are learning.

you should always be learning. and excited when you are. do you know everything?

There are projects you can try new things with and projects that should just work when it's expected for many people to use. Don't push your excitement to the users.

I really hope they aren't taking the same tack when dealing with the encryption portion of their service.

What would be the analogue?

Using openssl with a wrapper service? Doesn’t seem particularly dubious to me.

> Using openssl with a wrapper service?

Coincidentally, one of tailscale's founders already built this: https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

They have been trying to create or reinvent the database rather than using tried and true solutions. The analogue would be rolling your own cryptography.

They're using WireGuard for the tunneling. I don't think a lot of people will object

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