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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

What is the advantage over SQLite?

I needed a small for my C# MAME frontend IV/Play, it didn't matter if it was relational on not. I picked this over SQLite because it's a single native DLL with no dependencies. It also supports POCO mappings (think serialization) which usually requires some ORM type package.

SQLite in .NET is still a little messy - there are several versions in various state of support, and they all depend on multiple packages.

I am developing a mobile game and the BaaS we use (Gamesparks) uses MongoDB. Currently I use SQLite to cache the data locally, but that can be a pain to transform document formatted data to relational, and back. I wish I had known about this before (and I use Unity so the app code is C#).

SQLite can work as a document store too. Data can be any type (in spite of defined column types), and it works even for pretty big document sizes.

Interesting, I did not know that. However, I use a 3rd party framework to transform the table rows to classes, and I assume I would lose all that magic conversion. In other words, the reason I go through all the effort of transforming to relational is for querying and updating, but if I just put the raw document in there, I won't have granularity on my querying (I imagine).

You can store everything in JSON in SQLite and then query it using json functions (https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html) or even combine than with indexes on expressions (https://sqlite.org/expridx.html) if you have a good indexable property

Ok this is pretty cool. This is also why I love HN. I've been using SQLite for ~3 years, have I missed this from the beginning or has it been added since then?

Probably wasn't available at that time.

From the VCS history, looks like it was very first started on 2015-08-12, not sure when it became stable or part of a release.

It's definitely only about two years old. I remember commenting on it when someone submitted the repo timeline relating to JSON on HN.

Back in the dark ages as everyone upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit environments, shipping two versions of native dependencies caused extra hassle. However, this may not be much of an issue these days.

I don't know for sure, but I believe it would be that SQLite is relational, this is NoSQL (document key/value store)

It's native and NoSQL.

NoSQL is not a feature, it is the lack of a feature.

This car is a NoTires car! You don't have to go through the hassle of replacing your tires! :)

Any day, if someone invents wheels for the twentyfirst century. The rubber-rings are a kludge, not a fundamental condition of life.

Says you.

"NoSQL" is a meaningless term. Even when strictly taken as either not supporting SQL or not relational, it is a rather useless way to search for options.

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