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Comment by paranoidrobot | Hacker News Reader

"Just point it a file" skips all the bits you need for a production system.

How do you back it up, replicate it, handle two different processes/containers/servers wanting to access the same data.

Using a PAAS solution for a database, you get all that functionality.

I think the point to be learned here is that SQLite fundamentally does not fit in a PaaS model. They are even transparent with this limited use case[0]. I work with embedded systems so I use it a lot, and all the web work I do nowadays is one-off project site and small utilities that are usually a single process so I end up use SQLite 90% of the time I’m reaching for a solution.

0: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

I think it's more that PaaS vendors aren't interested in first-class SQLite support when they can sell overpriced managed Postgres instead. Sure, it doesn't scale the same way, so it's hard to move upmarket and sell to Enterprise, but it's a shame that there's no one-click solution like there is for a managed database.

Let's say the following product existed:

1. You can only run one instance of your app.

2. There is a small window of downtime each deploy.

3. Your app has access to 10 GB of storage. The storage is persisted across deploys and can be used for sqlite.

4. Your sqlite data is automatically backed up and can be restored / downloaded as needed.

How much per month would you pay for that product?

$20 per month assuming:

* Someone who knows Django but has zero devops skills can deploy my app with a few simple commands, add a fix, and demo it to me. Crucial: They must ask me zero questions.

* The backups happen to a non-you service, I one-click auth my google drive and/or dropbox.

* There are instructions on how to stand-up the web app on another service if you shut down. Those instructions might require two hours of my time, but should be complete.

I'd probably be willing to pay ~$10/mo. i.e. a 100% markup on a low-end $5 VPS box.

...but in addition to bravura's requirements, I'd add: I'd want SSL termination, ideally with the option of me bringing a custom domain.

Interesting question. I think you could probably get those features by deploying Piku or Dokku for like $4/mo on a VPS, and the equivalent managed Postgres on Render would be like $20/mo (16GB SSD), so something like $6-10 seems like the right range to me. Maybe not a booming business, but a nice margin percentage and worth paying for good UX. And the cheap version doesn't need to be the only version if people want more RAM, etc.

I'd find such a product really appealing, especially with a dedicated backup strategy that uses the SQLite backup API to do hourly snapshots or uses Litestream to S3 by default.

Let's say the price was 12. If this idea is compelling enough for you at that price point to venmo me an advance for your first month, I have some ideas to explore that could actually make this viable. FWIW, I've worked professionally on a PaaS and a managed database offering.

If you make it so I can have one SQLite database per user, I’d be a customer too

When you say per user, you mean per user of your app?

yeah exactly. I want each user's data to be silo'd in their own sqlite database each. It's basically just a multi-tenant setup using sqlite.

Cool, thanks for the clarification!

That's why "most cases".

If you are trying to replicate or make available to a bunch of machines or similar - it's likely the wrong thing (although there are tools to do this, I've never used them). If you are just trying to back it up there is a pretty simple back up command.

I think we disagree on the "most cases" aspect that

For most of the things I touch, having a single-point-of-failure data store is typically not acceptable for production environments, except perhaps caching.

If you are a good software engineer, you probably work at a place that needs good software engineers, which by definition tends to be a place with a system that needs high availability or low latency or both or something else, while serving a lot of customers or load or something, all of which basically results in a pretty complicated distributed system...

So in your day to day job as a good software engineer, yeah sqlite isn't going to be a good choice. It doesn't work well for the sorts of systems you work on. But if you were going to build a new social network for your college or something trivial like that, and you just want to move fast and have a crazy simple deployment setup, you might well use sqlite.

It's a file is relevant. It allows you to think of it like other files:

- how do you back up a JPG? You copy it, cause it's a file

- how do you replicate it? You copy it, cause it's a file. Unless you're talking about fancy DB replication, in which case well, that's not really a thing we do with files much. You'll have to do more research. but that's cause you're trying to do non-file things to a file.

- how do you handle two different processes accessing a JPG? They both open and read the JPG. Same for SQLite. For other concerns, you're trying to do things that don't map well to files, so once again more research needed.

Only you can’t copy it if it’s in the middle of a transaction or you corrupt it and have to roll back the Journal. And coping the journal, WAL, and DB itself directly and trying to backup from that isn’t recommended. In fact SQLite itself has a purpose built backup API.

https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/sqlite-the-only-database...

Yes, technically a SQLite database is just a file on disk. And for the most part, you can treat it like other files on disk. Except for when you can’t. The GP’s questions are valid

I don't update and append to jpgs though...

how do you handle two different processes writing to a JPG?

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