On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 13:45 -0400, Rob Richardson wrote:
I use both PostgreSQL and SQLite in my job. I have mixed feelings
about SQLite. If you play by its rules, it works very well, but I
think you have to understand its rules well. If you do not set up
your indexes correctly and do not use transactions correctly,
performance can be horrible, but if you do, its performance is
excellent. For some reason I doubt I will ever understand, its
developer thinks that it is a good thing not to require a column to
hold any particular type of information. One record can have an
integer in a field, while the next record in the table can have a
string in the same field. I would much rather have my database
enforce type consistency, and tell me when I'm screwing up. There is
no fixed date format. I suddenly found that one program that used
SQLite began writing dates as human-readable text strings for no
reason I could understand, after it had been writing them as Julian
dates (a floating-point number representing the number of days since a
given date) happily for years. I had to rewrite the corresponding
program that reads the data to be able to handle either strings or
Julian dates correctly and transparently, which was not easy.
But it is nice to have SQLite available for use in programs that will
be installed at multiple customer sites where we can't be sure if the
main database will be PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, or something
else.
I think it is also important to remember to use the right tool for each
job. SQLite is used for RPM as well as bookmarks for firefox. It makes
sense there. PostgreSQL would not.
SQLite is a small, cool, fast, embedded database.
Joshua D. Drake
RobR
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