"Usually"? I'm not saying there are literally no computers in existence that might have this much space on a single filesystem, but...has there ever been a known case of someone hitting this limit with a single SQLite file?
The limit is more about how much data you want to keep in sqlite before switching to a "proper" DBMS.
Also the limit above is for someone with the foresight that their database will be huge. In practice most sqlite files use the default page size of 4096, or 1024 if you created the file before the 2016 version. That limits your file to 17.6TB or 4.4TB respectively.
Though to be fair to those organizations. It's amazing the performance someone can get out of a quarter million dollars of off the shelf server gear. Just imagine how much RAM and enterprise grade flash that can get someone off of AMD or Intel's highest bin CPU even at that budget!
The largest filesystems I could find are ~1EB and 700PB at Oak Ridge.
FWIW, I took the ‘usually’ to mean usually the theoretical file size limit on a machine is smaller than theoretical SQLite limit. It doesn’t necessarily imply that anyone’s hit the limit.
Did a full-day deep dive into SQLite a while back; funny how one tiny database runs the whole world—phones, AI, your fridge, your face... and like, five people keep it alive.
Blows my mind.
I don't use it for sqlite, but having multi-petabyte filesystems, in 2025, is not rare.