> Why would it require a lot of RAM? I ask not because I doubt you, but > because my intuition says that a BTree based database should scale > pretty well. While certainly it would run faster if you can fit the > whole thing in RAM, if the index can be made to fit in RAM it seems > like the data can be just about any size.
I think you're probably right but I haven't done any research on it. I don't know if it needs to load the entire index into RAM. If it does, then one entry per unique key + some overhead for btree structure information will get fairly large. Since you'll want reasonable performance you'll probably want to put in as much RAM as you can reasonably afford. That would be an excellent question to add to the FAQ: "How do I estimate the resource requirements for a database?" > > > I've used much larger databases than this on all of the big > > commercial database engines (sqlserver, db2, informix, oracle). Any > > of them will certainly work for you. > > Again, my intuition would be tha for single-user usage patterns SQLite > should have less rather than more drop-off in performance than those. > Is there something about the way that SQLite handles large files that > would cause it to degrade faster than a commercial database? Are you > saying he could get by with less hardware using a heavier weight database? Sorry to mislead you there. I intended to say that if you decided against sqlite any of the other commercial offerings should work for you.
