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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, I would consider running SQLite in production, at least for my personal stuff, but the part that scares me is that there's no "managed SQLite" offering and I would have to manage it myself. Litestream seems like a great option for people like me, but I'd like to hear some experience report on it, especially on more complex case, and how it fails.

Another problem (which Litestream might solve) is that SQLite is not compatible with Heroku, that I use since I don't have much ops/sysadmin experience. I feel like people saying that SQLite makes things easier often have already some experience in sysadmin/ops stuff, which isn't my case.

This is not a criticism of SQLite in any way, just an expression of my own limitations and why it makes it harder for me to consider SQLite. I'll gladly take any learning resources about that.

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Litestream author here. I'm working on a serverless option that'll run as a managed service later this year. I think there's a huge opportunity to get a simple option for folks running on ephemeral platforms like Heroku, Google Cloud Run, & Cloudflare Workers.

That's nice to know, I'll keep an eye out for when it comes out.

Ooh hi Ben, thanks so much for Litestream! Can you say more about the service you're describing and how it will work?

The conservative approach — I like it! Yeah it's not for everyone but it's a real delight if your needs align with what SQLite offers.

> there's no "managed SQLite" offering

It's just a file :) You can copy it to a remote server or use Litestream or whatever you want to do with a file.

> SQLite is not compatible with Heroku

Yeah, that's pretty annoying. Apparently fly.io is similar to Heroku but lets you use persistent disks — I've never used it though.

I'd love to see more "managed app server + sqlite" options, since a lot of the times the "managed database server" option from cloud hosts is kind of expensive. Send emails to Heroku and DigitalOcean and Google Computer platform. Tell the world!

I see how SQLite being just a file makes it easy to do lots of things from a developer point of view. However, I'm looking at this from a "business owner" point of view, at which point it's not just a file, it's my clients data. That's a bit scary for me, so I have a bias for "reassuring stuff" like managed databases with automated backups. This is why I'm looking for more info on "the hard parts" of managing SQLite. I'm conscious that this bias might not be based on reality, especially since I don't know well MySQL or PostgreSQL, especially how they store data on files. But as a relatively young developer, I've heard a lot that "data should go in the database" and databases are big scary things that should be managed by people with lots of experience and knowlegde in that role.

I'll take a look at fly.io, thanks.

Just to add to this: offering managed SQLite services isn't really all that much of a thing because essential, as it is just a file, there isn't much to manage.

With databases like postgres you have daemons, config files and more that need an experienced DB-Admin to configure and run. All of that complexity grows exponentially when you include scaling on multiple machines.

With SQLite you essentially need backups. That's about it. A managed SQLite service would essentially just be something along the lines of:

"Tell us which file is your database, we backup it and if you need it restored press this button."

That's a good point. I think this is my lack of experience showing here, mixed with lots of marketing aimed at people like me. After all, you can sell a managed Postgres for a lot more than you can sell a managed SQLite.

Well maybe to you "managed database server" feels more reassuring which is fine, but to me I run my business off SQLite which I've found insanely simple to set up and maintain, so that is more reassuring to me.

And just an aside, I think if you looked into it a bit you'd probably find that while there is a lot of nuance to database fine tuning, you can get most of that without needing to be an expert.

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