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Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

There's a laundry list of benefits that all add up, not like one specific killer feature. Some applications really do have very complex configuration needs, but it's sorta situation dependent on whether embedding a scripting language or a database is the right solution (for really simple cases I'm more likely to reach for TOML).

An incomplete list of benefits of using SQLite:

- Runtime config changes for free

- type safety

- strong migration support

- incorrect configurations can be unrepresentable (or at least enforced with check constraints)

- interactable from text-based interfaces and strong off-the-shelf GUI support

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Type safety as a benefit of SQLite? For me type safety is a negative of SQLite. Being able to store a different type that what the column is declared to store is a bug (not a feature). I also find the lack of DATE and DATETIME/TIMESTAMP to be less than ideal.

We are talking about an application file format, so "type errors" are about who's right: the application (even better, multiple equally right implementation of a specification) or random hackers altering the file in incorrect ways.

Loose type checks, e.g. NOT NULL columns of "usually" text, are loose only compared to typical SQL table definitions; compared to the leap forward of using abstract tables and changing them with abstract SQL instead of using text or byte buffers and making arbitrary changes, enforcing data types on columns would be only a marginal improvement.

I pretty much always store date/times as Unix epoch integers. Also use STRICT tables and set the PRAGMA to enforce foreign key constraints.

Most frameworks can serialize and deserialize JSON from strongly typed classes. For example, Newtonsoft in .NET. The rest isn't worth the effort for most people. Your scenario may be unusual.

I've certainly had some unusual contents in the past where we had approximately 10,000 configurable properties on the system, but we didn't use SQLite for that. Regardless, you ignored 3 of the 4 (I'll ignore the last one, it applies to JSON too) other points I made. My use cases aren't that weird and I'm not saying reach for SQLite every time, it's one option out of many. Migrations and runtime configuration change alone justify it for me in many cases.

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