> In the dream SQLite plus LiteFS world, you have all the advantages of SQLite and all the advantages of a fully replicated multi-writer database setup. Any individual server can go down without causing any downtime for the application as a whole, and every user has a full copy of the application and all its data, running extremely close to them.
These are some of the problems I’m working on solving with Litebase (alpha), which runs on SQLite and distributed storage. Most SQLite solutions rely on replicating data between nodes, but I’m taking a simpler approach by using distributed storage for durability, availability, and replication, combined with a lightweight consensus system between primary and replica nodes.
I’m working on getting a public alpha ready, but you can check out the project so far. I’ll create a thread on Hacker News once things are ready.
Litebase writes data to a tiered storage system (local, network, and object) for easier distribution. Using SQLite's VFS API I've also implemented a different type of storage that allows the primary to write data without full consensus with replicas. It's kind of like a multi-versioned log structured merge tree.
SQLite has simply become "good enough" for production. So now you can take that dev default and simply deploy it for apps of a certain size and category if you want.
> I was still caught out by some of the ways things are different.
I feel this is the problem with frameworks, they have to keep evolving and growing and even people who have been doing it 20 years can get caught out.
But the architecture of the Web has basically not changed that much. We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
Definitely not just a Rails thing.
The reason for the "lite" in the name is that it doesn’t run a separate process, it doesn’t listen on a port or a socket, and you can’t connect to it.
The suffix "ite" is derived from the Greek word lithos (from its adjectival form -ites), meaning rock or stone [0]
Me, I say "sequeLITE" with the emphasis on the last syllable, but now I'm thinking of switching to "SEQuelite". You'll never catch me pronouncing it "ess-cue-ell" either way dammit!
:)
The main benefit over psql of course being that you don’t need to pay for a hosted db like RDS, or have a separate database server.
I’ve found a happy middle ground in simply self-hosting psql and my apps on the same VPS with something like dokploy. Local development is still easy enough, and remote deployment in containers is 1-click with Dokploy, and ends up being simpler to reason about IMO. My take below, if anyone’s interested.
https://nikodunk.com/2025-06-10-diy-serverless-(coreos-+-dok...
There are multiple simple ways of doing SQLite backups https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html#vacuuminto https://sqlite.org/rsync.html - or just lock and copy the file.
If you need to scale enough that it is a concern, then its not a good fit for your use case.
If you need to scale writes.
Been following the Cloudflare features with interest along the way... currently have a pretty good size VPS I've been using.
20 years ago it was MySQL and now it's usually postgres, and these are both still fine. Easier than ever to get setup and going in production. Outside of quite niche needs, I can't understand why one would put up with the pain of using sqlite. Plus it's setting up an even more painful migration later if you do grow.
I think its more about the issue that databases like postgres are too much "magic". With Sqlite you see your database file, its a physical something. You want to move it to another server, its just a copy action, no dump/restore. You want to "upgrade", there is no mess like with postgres.
You want to create client separation, ... its just a file per client.
> although even there I have to be aware of the one writer only limitation.
The writer limit has not been a limit forever. You can easily do 20k writes per second, what is way beyond what most system anyway. You want 100k? A slightly different access pattern and voila. You want 1 million ... There are ways around it. If you put Sqlite vs Postgres for instance, ironically, seen Sqlite winning against postgres despite that single writer.
The whole hands on "we know what file is, where it is, and how to gain access to it" is really amazing. The whole "do not need to think about how to secure it on the network" also helps a lot.
Do i use Sqlite in production? No ... Postgres its extension support just rules. But i see the appeal for many.
The problem with that thought is that in order for sqlite to be as full featured as it is, it also has a lot of "magic". I've also had to dive into the postgres code a few times to understand how it's doing something, and I've generally found it well structured and easy to navigate, and surprisingly terse - there's not that much "magic" really.
If I had to start something new, I'd use SQLite until at least high 5 digit queries per second. Maybe more.
phamilton•2h ago
It had the fascinating property of being a full multi-writer SQL engine when using Page Level Conflict Checking. Even more fascinating: every single client itself becomes a writer.
ncruces•1h ago
It involves fiddling the database header to ensure you can keep track of the read-set from the VFS layer, by convincing SQLite to drop its page cache at the start of every transaction.
Other than that, a MVCC VFS is relatively straightforward. Here's an in-memory experiment if a few hundred lines of Go: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/v0.29.0/vfs/mvcc/...
I haven't settled on what's a good storage layer for something like this.