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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

You want your client to be standalone, you can't expect users to install and configure postgresql and sqlite probably isn't gonna cut it.

If you want blockchain stats, postgres is great, but for a node you just need to be able to look stuff up by its keys. Leveldb was made for that and it's good at doing it.

I don't know these attacks, but it seems you don't really need ACID that badly, most stuff is append only and once appended it never gets deleted.

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I'm curious, why wouldn't sqlite cut it? Granted, I'm not a blockchain afficiando, but I have several sqlite DBs that run a couple hundred gigabytes a piece that work quite well.

I said probably because I thought about it myself while writing that comment. I also have good experience with it, but if sqlite only talks SQL then just creating string representation of binaries would already be prohibitive.

> but if sqlite only talks SQL

What does that mean? Like any RDBMS, SQLite is interfaced with in SQL, but can store and process binary data just fine.

I mean that you need to serialize binary just to make an SQL statement that includes it, and that's very expensive. E.g. postgresql's COPY supports binary format which allows you to avoid that.

The fact that SQLite is embedded means it can take full advantage of pointer passing. I don't think it serializes anything when you bind parameters to a blob.

FWIW, you can use the binary protocol for SELECTs too.

SQLite would cut it just fine. Though it would also need an extension like this one, if you'd want the signature verification and hashing to happen inside SQLite.

The difference between SQLite and Postgres would be that more than one client can connect over the network to PG (or most any other sql db out there really), while SQLite is meant to be embedded, which, if you already have LevelDB working (as is the case in Bitcoin Core), wouldn't be all that different.

I'm not sure why that's an argument. Why can't you expect?

Its like saying WordPress users should not setup a database. There is a transactional usecase for this - having a high performance, ACID datastore.

And you are mistaken: here's a comment by achow101 of Bitcoin Core - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1394020.msg14159449#...

LevelDB being stupid is one of the major reasons that people have to reindex on Bitcoin Core crashes. There have been proposals to replace it but so far there are no plans on doing so. However people are working on using different databases in Bitcoin Core and those are being implemented and tested.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6z776p/breaking_bi...

What doesn't help this is LevelDB's transaction format: when you update the utxo set, you want to do this atomically (otherwise you may end up with a corrupted state). To do so, you start a DB transaction (do not confuse this with Bitcoin tx, this is just how you build a change set before pushing it to disk), update the change set then commit the tx. With LevelDB, as long as the transaction is live, the entire changeset will remain in RAM (usually a DB engine writes the changes on disk as you provide them, then updates internal pointers at commit time to apply the change), basically double dipping on the RAM hogging and I/O inefficiency

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