'Lite' Databases (Re: sqlite3 and dates)

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Mario Figueiredo <marfig at gmail.com> wrote:
> I usually think of my relationship with postgre as similar to what I
> experienced with Git. At first I was just dumbstruck by the whole
> thing and my first reaction was to ignore it and just do version
> control as I knew with the tools I knew. But once my brain clicked
> into 'Git mode' and I realized its philosophy and its processes, I
> immediately recognized the benefits and understood why everyone was
> telling me Git was easy to use and highly useful.

(Side point: If you're going to treat PostgreSQL the way you'd treat a
girlfriend/boyfriend, you should probably be careful of how you
address him. "Postgres" or "PostgreSQL", but not usually "Postgre".)

This is a quite apt analogy. You have to get your head around some
fundamentals, but once you do, life becomes amazing.

>>then there is SQLite, which does 99% of what I want it to do other than
>>network use.
>
> SQLite misses some important features that makes it better suited as a
> simple datastore, not much unlike shelve. And network use is not one
> of them, since you can actually implement concurrent sqlite access by
> coding an intermediate layer. Assuming of course we are talking about
> a small number of concurrent users.

This is what I was saying: it's fine for purposes like Firefox's
bookmarks and settings and such (which I think was what it was
originally developed for?). Not so fine over a network.

Adding an intermediate layer is a lot more effort than you might
think. By the time you've gone there, you should be looking at
PostgreSQL anyway. I tried to bolt networking support onto a couple of
different databasing systems, back in the 90s, and it was faintly
ridiculous... I mean, it worked, but if I'd had today's Postgres, I
would never have done anything of the sort.

ChrisA