SQLite

Long-term owners

SQLite even had single memory write bugs that allowed code execution which lay in the code for 20 years without anyone spotting them.

Feb 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• PGliteReal Postgres compiled to WASM that runs embedded in apps and tests, avoiding Docker for quick isolated instances. Critics note it allows only one writer connection.49recommend
• DuckDB WASMLets people run SQL queries directly in the browser against local data such as Parquet files, without a backend server. Critics note the WebAssembly build lacks some features of the native version and the download is heavy.11recommend
• StoolapPeople recommend Stoolap as a pure Rust embedded SQL database with good documentation, a substantial test suite and full ACID compliance, though it is very new and critics doubt it is ready for production data.9recommend
• SlateDBOpen-source embedded database built to run directly on object storage such as S3. Critics say it is not purpose-built for streaming workloads.6recommend
• SlothDBFree, open-source embedded SQL database that people compare with DuckDB on speed benchmarks. Critics want more data and architecture explanation, and raise security concerns for embedded use.6recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1499 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Just by its testing and its number of installations (real world testing) you could consider SQLite being more "industrial strength" than any other DB on the market.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions”

2. There are many cases where SQLite + concurrent front end (like a go net/http server) can handle all the load that a service might ever conceivably have to handle

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

3. I so far have gone the sqlite route for my hobby apps as it's so easy to handle and doesn't require setting up two docker containers for a single app.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

4. For a project where sqlite is good enough, just using it plus the amazing sqlite rsync command on a cron job gives you pretty amazing capabilities.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Show HN: rqlite – the fault-tolerant DB built on SQLite – v10.0 released”

5. Sqlite is essentially a user space queryable file system and it can be faster than writing to file system directly while working with small files.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “We made our filesystem 47× faster by deleting it”

6. these writes are exceptionally fast and are serialized to the file-system anyway, so functionally equivalent to concurrent writes for p50 use case

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

7. Sqlite is also the only major database to receive DO-178B certification, which allows Sqlite to legally operate in avionic environments and roles.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Do You Even Need a Database?”

8. SQLite is a good example to bring up because its extensive closed-source tests are what’s often cited as being what keeps people from forking it.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests”

9. My experience with sqlite for server-based apps has been that as your app grows, you almost always eventually need something bigger than sqlite

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack”

10. Choosing SQLite does mean that it will also be tested for code paths that your application will never touch, but who cares about that?

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Do You Even Need a Database?”

11. SQLite even had single memory write bugs that allowed code execution which lay in the code for 20 years without anyone spotting them.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Building SQLite with a Small Swarm”

12. due to the in-process nature of SQLite and overall good performance of inserts you can do A LOT even with SQLite's concurrency model

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite”

13. all the hard parts I was reinventing were probably faster and less likely to break if I used something thoroughly audited and tested

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format”

14. No version upgrades, no connection limits, no pooler, no failover drill, no separate thing to monitor, no separate thing to pay for

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite Is All You Need”

15. SQLite itself has a number of limitations that doesn't make it well suited to being the backing engine of your network-first DBMS

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

16. But it's timing-dependent: lose the race and you'll end up backing up a partially written transaction, making the backup corrupt.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite Is All You Need”

17. Battle tested and tested to hell, maybe yes. But still horrible insecure architecture, with read-only access being able to write.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “DoltLite: A SQLite fork with Git-style version control, built with 2k agent PRs”

18. together with backend and runtime state squashed inside single sqlite so you can create/delete them independently without a fuss

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Useful patterns for building HTML tools”

19. I've never had SQLite corrupt a database file, and given how widely it's used literally everywhere without reports of corruption

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “How SQLite is tested”

20. you can go far further than you think on sqlite - it's multitudes of magnitude quicker than postgres for most general use cases.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite Is All You Need”

21. I agree that SQLite requires less maintenance, but you still need to vacuum to prevent the database file from accumulating space

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”

22. it will not have SQLite's reliability over the extremely long tail of edge cases proven through its testing and use in real life

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK”

23. I ran into crippling file system race conditions. This was because we were hosted on a distributed file system in the cloud which I learned is very very bad for sqlite.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite Is All You Need”

24. ive used sqlite a couple times with WAL to try and make a small app shared between 2-3 people who all would contribute updates thru it but it wasnt ideal

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”

25. SQLite has a "lite" in the name for a reason, but it's often pushed into places where it's being asked to do things it was never really designed for.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Tailscale Traces Database Corruption to 16y/o SQLite WAL-Reset Bug”

26. It's a little frustrating that all this extra cruft is necessary to get the world's most popular RDBMS to take data correctness seriously.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Prefer Strict Tables in SQLite”

27. after trying myself I think I'd never reach for it in production because it lacks a lot of power that a database like Postgres has

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite in Production: Optimizing WAL Mode, Concurrency, and VFS Layers”

28. in sqlite you need to write some app code to batch transactions in the app, so it has non-trivial development and maintenance cost

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack”

29. Some firms don't understand how to do data management, and if we draw the venn diagram of those and the ones that ban sqlite, it'd be pretty close to a circle.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format”

30. SQLite solves this issue by allowing you to write with page level granularity rather than being forced to dump the whole file for a single tiny change!

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Why the KeePass format should be based on SQLite”

31. One of the reasons SQLite was mostly stable over the years was it sand-boxed its closed developer environment, and clearly defined the project scope.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “DoltLite: A SQLite fork with Git-style version control, built with 2k agent PRs”

32. being able to do json_extract and json_each directly in SQL instead of writing a Python preprocessing step saved a surprising amount of complexity

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had”

33. it's pretty trivial to migrate the data from SQLite into a separate Postgres server later, if it turns out you do need those features after all

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack”

34. It is less convenient than being able to directly alter columns, but you do not need to mess around with writable schemas or risk corruption.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite in Production: Optimizing WAL Mode, Concurrency, and VFS Layers”

35. sqlite a as the coordination boundary: business state, queue state, stream offsets, retries, and acks all sharing one transactional substrate

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file”

36. There doesn't really seem to exist a good schemaless single-file format that supports advanced queries. There is only SQLite and maybe HDF5.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns”

37. you can just put an in-memory SQLite or Postgres in place for your testing and get all the performance advantages with none of the downside

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast”

38. SQLite is very good if you can fit into the single writer, multiple readers pattern; you'll never lose data if you use the correct settings

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format”

39. If you were to use SQLite within conventional means the answer is very. SQLite does provide repair tools for when such mishap occurs.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “How SQLite is tested”

40. The “myth” is you can’t use it for a website because if you have multiple requests that need to write they can’t do it concurrently.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions”