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Comment by bluejellybean | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, if I have PostgreSQL containerized in docker such that it's trivially easy to spin up a new database, what then is the use-case for SQLite? I frequently hear people talk about it with such rosy tone, but I just don't see the reason to actually set it up when the alternatives today are so easy to use, what am I missing?

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You'd be surprised how many programs running on things that aren't web application servers which end up using relational queries.

I remember my first encounter with it under the hood. It was a huge list of all my location data stored on my early generation iphone, you had to pull some tricks to extract the file off of your phone and then boom I got a map of where I had been around 2009 better than even I remember it. I think there was a congressional hearing over this. Now they just store that stuff off of the device.

I mean, why reach for the cordless screwdriver when all you need is a couple turns of a Phillips head? It’s cool that it’s easy to spin up databases but that’s a lot of complexity that may not be necessary in all cases.

Because it's even easier to embed sqlite, that's why. Docker is a big and heavy tool that has nonzero baggage. SQLite is a single .c/.h file.

Single file Easy to embed No ports, no sockets Easy to back up

If you were to ship a desktop app that stored its local data in relational format, would you bundle docker and postgres along with it?

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