> "If SQLite is as good as you say, then why is it free?" Others have mentioned the irrelevancy of cost to worth in the software industry.
For you, the appropriateness of the platform should be driven by the requirements of the system. Do you have a system where many different users access the DB at the same time? SQLite can handle that, when written properly; I recall DRH making the comment on the list that there was a message board using SQLite. Unfortunately, I don't recall the specifics. On the other hand, if you've got several million users accessing the DB via the web, desktop apps and phone apps, I wouldn't even think of using SQLite in that situation. Your requirements, not the preferences of any given group, should determine the database platform used. SQLite has the advantage of being light-weight, where SQL Server is not. SQL Server has a faily high maintenance cost, both in terms of purchase price, maintenance contracts and database administration personnel, where SQLite is cheap to buy and pretty simple to maintain. However, when it comes to thousands of transactions per minute, such as our company web-site experiences, then a full blown RDBMS is the only way to go. > "If anyone can see the source code, then won't we be venerable to hackers?" By that criterion, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) would be useless, apache servers would get more hackers than IIS ones, and everybody's code would be safer in Visual Source Safe than in CVS.
