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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

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sgt101

You. Were. Running. An. Insurance. Company. On. SQLite?

What?

What possessed them?

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The database in question was 80mb, which is very small. It’s also fast and backups are as simple as copying the file.

Not advocating for this particular use case, but we’ve all seen more egregious abuses of SQLite.

lol according to github 80 MB is not small - https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/m...

Git is designed for text files. An 80 MB text file is huge. An 80 MB binary database is tiny.

I depends what you are putting into it... I think it's completely feasible to get 100000 customer records into 80 MB... and then some

Git is a tool to diff code. Github host git repositories.

You are using Github to store data, not code.

Sounds like a perfectly cromulent solution to me. It's an upgrade from Excel!

True in many ways, yet Excel is considerably more robust.

Can you back that up? SQLite has an extremely strong reputation for robustness.

Check the new workflow diagram. If I read it correctly, they still edit the database as a spreadsheet and convert that into sql. The diagram is near this text:

> we reduced the process down to a 1- click solution. We built a dashboard in our underwriting platform that actuaries can visit and request factor changes. With a single click, an asynchronous job kicks off, automating the steps of Google Sheet extraction > parsing > codegen > SQL script generation > PR creation. The only engineering involvement now required is a PR review.

This is completely unhinged, right? Am I crazy? All that work just to make absolutely 100% sure their staff never have to try to learn anything new or modify their processes in any way shape or form.

utterly utterly unhinged.

It's basically a design that someone both very naive and suffering late stage Rabies would come up with.

Well snapshotting/backup isn't hard

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