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Comment by pachico | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong, I run SQLite in production with millions of records, but it seems people have discovered it just very recently. All of the sudden, there's always a post about it with hundreds of comments.

What changed?

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Author here. I agree there's been a resurgence lately. My working theory is that the performance of the underlying hardware has increased so much in the last decade that the simplicity of SQLite has become a more important tradeoff than the extra performance boost you may see with Postgres/MySQL. Also, network overhead tends to dominate small queries so SQLite can actually end up a lot faster since it's in-process.

I wrote up a longer version here: https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/

“the performance of the underlying hardware has increased so much in the last decade that the simplicity of SQLite has become a more important tradeoff”

Thanks for articulating this so clearly! It's going to be interesting also to see how much simplicity is realized from new thread-per-core designs leveraging io_uring to get rid of multithreading, locks and memory barriers scattered throughout the control plane. The performance dynamics are all changing and it's easier than ever to be writing simple, fast systems, that hit the 90% sweet spot.

You've probably also seen McSherry et. al's “Scalability! But at what COST?” [1]

[1] http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...

It seems to come in waves, there was another round of SQLite posts hitting the front page around 6 months ago as I recall.

I'm not sure why, SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine on the planet, so it's not as if the technology is really "gaining" in popularity ... it's already there.

I was always curious if this is due to the huge number of new developers, many front-end, who have joined IT over the past decade or so, now venturing out and beginning to learn about relational databases and their benefits.

Flyio is bullish on sqlite. They post a lot of tech stuff about it. That helps sqlite, but also keeps Flyio in the news.

That's true as far as it goes, but also Ben works here,exclusively on the open-source Litestream project, so his blog posts end up on our blog sort of naturally.

I suspect part of it is things like litestream, dqlite, rqlite, etc. Opens it up to people who have to make it work in some distributed fashion.

Notice how all these articles have the same author?

NoSQL is no longer cool

What about NewSQL?

That’s just SQL with extra (distributed) steps

The new edge computing fad. These companies need a way to bring the database to the edge too, so they are heavily promoting sqlite as the best thing since slice bread to sell their services as the one solution to all your problems :)

Possibly confirmation bias but 'Simple' has gotten really trendy and for databases it doesn't get much simpler.

Quite a few posts appealing to the idea of "why are we doing all this nonsense? X does the job just fine".

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