Twelve years of distributed SQLite

268 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by otoolep

42 Comments

piterrro

8 hours ago

Having used D1 in production - it's not very reliable. There was a comment on HN from one of D1 devs [1] saying that D1 is a sql wrapper on top of durable objects that mimicks sqlite distributed like nature.

> I'll let you in on a sort of dirty secret: It's almost always better to use Durable Objects storage, rather than D1. Even if you only want a single global database, it's better to implement that as a singleton Durable Object, than by using D1. Because that's all D1 itself actually is: a singleton Durable Object that exposes an API to its SQLite database. It's just a wrapper.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611834

ruther4d

3 hours ago

D1 also gives read replication and point in time recovery, but my biggest issue with it is you can’t create D1 dbs dynamically like you can with durable objects so things like tenancy are harder

vikrantrathore

5 hours ago

Its funny, when I was reading part time parliament paper (paxos) and while learning zig and odin language created a pure paxos library and then the first application for that library was to build a multi-master sqlite. The two approaches I took are very different in case of zig I build zaxonlite (https://github.com/insanai/zaxonlite) and have a benchmark on it that includes rqlite. It uses WAL replication as strategy. The second attempt I tried in odin is sqlodin (https://github.com/insanai/sqlodin), in this the system does not use WAL but run sql query on each node, as result subset of sql query in sqlite are not supported.

thadt

an hour ago

Wow, a 155 page book for a relatively new project is interesting - what was your workflow for that? It looks mostly generated - is it used in its entirety as context to a top-level agent when working on new features, or are you directing it to just take relevant subsections? Why the PDF output (it does look nice)?

AgentME

4 hours ago

The comparisons between various projects, including between rqlite and Litestream, were interesting. (rqlite uses a consensus algorithm between nodes to keep them synced and allow changing the primary node, while Litestream just syncs itself to S3 so another node could take over with the data from there.)

I fully expected the article to get into D1 shortly and mention how that's about the same relationship between Cloudflare Durable Objects (which D1 is based on) and celld, an open source reimplementation of Cloudflare Durable Objects which writes to S3. But then the article treats D1 with a very sudden snarky disinterest, and then the final section feels very awkwardly defensive of rqlite and defeatist.

Kinrany

8 hours ago

Is there a project that does all of these together?

- embeddable like sqlite

- clustered like dqlite

- has a standalone node like rqlite

- can be backed up to S3 like litesteeam

- optionally AP like cr-sqlite alongside CP

punnerud

7 hours ago

https://github.com/punnerud/mpedb is not there yet, focused on sync between sqlite3, Postgresql and Oracle. Shown that concurrent writes to sqlite3 is possible at the speed of Postgresql (My own project)

thriftwy

4 hours ago

This sounds a lot like Apache Ignite 2.x, though it does not have SQLite's level of polish.

Kinrany

2 hours ago

It's never going to be embeddable, no?

thriftwy

2 hours ago

It is a set of Java dependencies so a full data-bearing Ignite node will happily be an in-process part of your Java monolithic app or microservice. It has likewise bindings for .Net and some other languages but not so seamless as in case of JVM.

mmnfrdmcx

3 hours ago

As someone who loved sqlite and the simplicity, the truth is that with agents I am finding it is extremely easy to manage postgres and it is realyl nice having all the SQL features of postgres -- sqlite is quite limiting in a lot of SQL. So if you are considering remote sqlite and all that, feels a better time than ever to just use a database server. Of course, sqlite is amazing for local tools etc.

brooksbp

9 hours ago

Was a fun read until the end where the author made damn sure that history records who drew the blueprint.

pbowyer

6 hours ago

Seems fair to me. The VC-backed SQLite services have been shouting about their services as if they came up with the idea, and this only balances that out.

He's right that histories start too late, and I'd like to see more posts like this that trace the history back further than the last 5 years. Like for databases, a lot can go back 20+ years and it's good to read how the idea came about (independently from many people), how it developed over time and why.

Scaevolus

8 hours ago

"Honesty" is what crossed the threshold for me. It's pretty weird to spend 12 years on something and not bother to write the thousand word history yourself.

gizzlon

6 hours ago

I've been looking for a reason to use rqlite, but so far sqlite + litestream have been safe enough (some dataloss acceptable in extreme cases)

My understanding is that rqlite gives you "stored in more than place" guarantees, which is nice if you need it. Much slower than a 1 node db though.

chasil

10 hours ago

I have never examined this in any detail before. It looks far easier than the mass majority of clustered database architectures.

https://rqlite.io/

qaq

9 hours ago

using it for control layer pretty happy so far

gizzlon

6 hours ago

can you query the local rqlite, or do you always have to go to the leader?

pizzafeelsright

4 hours ago

docs - Queries, by default, are also serviced by the cluster Leader.

it is great, fun, easy.

lukaslalinsky

4 hours ago

How long have you been using it? I've always been disappointed with similar systems, etcd including.

klamann

6 hours ago

If you don't get any joy out of writing about your personal experiences in your own voice, why bother writing about them at all?

phrotoma

3 hours ago

I get zero LLM vibes from this blog post.

AgentME

2 hours ago

It's loaded with it to my eyes. (Pangram also agrees and flags the whole post as AI generated.)

  # 2014: rqlite
  The need was concrete.

  # Before 2014, and alongside it
  Two things deserve mention for honesty’s sake.
(the above line is extremely typical of Claude Opus 4.8 and 5.0)

  [...] and the main difference is of one of packaging:

  # What the twelve years show
  Three things, I think.
  The core was right. [...] Nobody has found a reason to stop doing it.
  The design space has three corners, and they appeared in order.
(What order? The corners of this design space, which aren't spelled out until the following sentence, don't have any other natural ordering. This type of misapplied flourish feels very typical of LLMs.)

bomewish

5 minutes ago

Yeah it felt like claudeslop to me too — and such a strange choice. Maybe dude dictated it and said Claude to write it up. Save some time. Even so.

klamann

31 minutes ago

I envy you. For better or worse, Claude is the author I've read the most in this year. There's a handful of human authors I know well enough so that I would recognize a text that was written by them. With LLMs, it's much easier than with humans, since the current generation of LLMs seems utterly incapable of changing their style.

dizhn

2 hours ago

There are a bunch but in my opinion not conclusive.

formerly_proven

4 hours ago

Kinda grating to have the story of your project told in default Claudese, to be honest.

joostdecock

7 hours ago

We use rqlite in production, it's the database we chose for (the control plane of) an open source observability solution we're building (morio.it).

Just came here to say two things:

- rqlite is amazing and warmly recommend - Philip is an exceptionally dedicated, kind, and helpful maintainer

5 stars, no notes. Thank you Philip, I'm eternally grateful for all your great work.

tra3

10 hours ago

I know that latest rails suggests SQLite as one of the production options. I don’t get how it’d work with concurrent access though. Time to look into it.

nchmy

an hour ago

Because sqlite is extremely fast. Most projects won't hit its limits

npn

10 hours ago

Wal or wal2 can help you with that.

bfren

7 hours ago

I maintain one of the client libraries for rqlite - I’ve found it an excellent concept really well implemented. One of my favourite bits is it gives you back json making Dapper-like mapping super easy in .NET and I suspect other languages.

feverzsj

10 hours ago

There is also hctree from sqlite.

esafak

11 hours ago

Very timely for me. I run dqlite in a small cluster and I'm looking to move off it to something more robust. What's recommended in this regime?

a3nz3g

10 hours ago

Like the idea of distributed SQLite, but do we have benchmark? What use cases it has advantage?