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Comment by tl | Hacker News Reader

https://antonz.org/sqlite-is-not-a-toy-database/ — 240K inserts per second on a single machine in 2021. The problem you describe is real, but the TPS ceiling is wrong by three orders of magnitude on modern hardware.

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Do you know why it is a toy? Because in a real prod environment after inserting 240k rows per second for a while you have to deal with the fact that schema evolution is required. Good luck migrating those huge tables with Sqlite ALTER table implementation

Try doing that on a “real” DB with hundreds of millions of rows too. Anything more than adding a column is a massive risk, especially once you’ve started sharding.

Yes it might be risky. But most schema evolution changes can be done with no or minimal downtime even if you have to do then in multiple steps. When is a simple ALTER going to be totally unacetable if youare using Sqlite?

This doesn't seem like a toy but you know... realizing different systems will have different constraints.

Not everyone needs monopolistic tech to do their work. There's probably less than 10,000 companies on earth that truly need to write 240k rows/second. For everyone else, we can focus on better things.

> realizing different systems will have different constraints.

I realize that. There are a few comments already that present use cases where I can totally see using Sqlite as a good option.

> Not everyone needs monopolistic tech to do their work

We are talking about localhost Postgres vs SQLite here. Both are open source.

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