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Comment by jstsch | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but SQLite continues to impress me. This year, we've added a simple form builder to our product which allows creators to quickly gather feedback/input from their audiences. Basically each form has it's own small sqlite database as a datastore and a json file for the form definition (field styling/constraints, etc). It's 'low tech', but performs great. Not having an additional service running also means having one less thing to maintain.

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Been feeling lately the fatigue of managing 3-5 different services for a every single trivial project. This pushed me to explore adding SQLite support in my product [1], i think I'll wrap a Litestream [2] process in the same container and call it "Backed in a Box" :)

[1] https://github.com/subzerocloud/blue-steel

[2] https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream

edit: typo

SQLite is the cornerstone behind our "One zip file = one entire product instance" devops experience.

I would be interested in hearing more about how you deploy. I’m guessing the zip has the application(s) and SQLite is for configuration?

I used Sqlite and wasn't impressed.

Their SQL dialect is lacking. Parsing a date or regex extraction are extremely difficult. You have to resort to WITH RECURSIVE.

You can just supply your own function to parse the date.

In most database systems that would be a disaster, because the database would have a send a request over the network back to your program for each argument it needs to process. For SQLite, it's no big deal, because it's executing in the same address space as your program so it's a simple function call.

I'll admit that it does make it harder to port your program to another language, so it's more of a workaround than an ideal solution.

How would do that easily?

Did you mean writing a c extension of Sqlite?

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