There’s an industry wide fad (like ChatGPT) and then there’s a hacker news wide fad which is SQLite :-). Not sure how it all started. Last few months (or my be even an year) there has been an unprecedented number of SQLite posts. What gives?
Value (in the abstract, not just $ sense) accrued around SQL.
At some point, so much value accrued that people were using it for things it wasn't designed to do.
SQLite provided a solution for "people who want to use a database, but don't look like traditional database operators." Turns out there's a lot of those.
That this large userbase existed was a brilliant observation, combined with brilliant execution in shepherding and evolving SQLite since.
And none of the above would've been possible if the SQL interface hadn't been standardized and adopted over the last few decades*.
* Turns out, SQL's 50th anniversary will be 2024
SQLite (and it's founder, Richard Hipp) are an inspirational example of such success.
Which, of course, is very much the case with SQLite. It shows that a small team with a vision and an emphasis on quality can make a product that becomes pervasive in the industry for decades.
EDIT: did some counting, certainly a huge increase.
Threads with "sqlite" in the title:
2022: 346
2019: 142
SQLite has been appearing a lot more often on HN because of a different more recent fad: edge computing.
I suspect popularity here comes in waves through a Katamari Damacy effect. People start reading about a topic, and start posting, thus more people read, research, post, etc... until a saturation point, a cooling off period, and then a rebuild.
[0]: obviously not the same as whats happening on HN, I'd love to see someone pull these numbers from the HN API!
Go and Rust work great with SQLite because all the concurrency is mediated within a single application process.
During the PHP and Ruby years, SQLite did not work that well and still does not, because the different worker processes can't communicate and SQLite has an extremely poor-performing sleep loop around the write lock.
This gave it a low-performance reputation compared to MySQL and Postgres that it has struggled to shake off.