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SQLite Is Serverless

sqlite.org

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Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#151

Post by Frost1x »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #144
aikah wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this mean that you can hack some database storage (w/ sqlite) together on frontend only hosting platforms like Github or Netlify? You can run SQLlite in the client via webassembly therefore open a SQLite file in the browser to query it yes, you just can't write anything in it and expect it to persist somehow on the static hosting service itself. > The best I came up with: let's say you have a toy project, and…

You could make it persist if you have it uploaded somewhere. But then I guess thats not serverless.

"Serverless" is a garbage marketing term in general. It sounds sexy to nontechnical management folks who are used to hearing a bunch of expensive costs and the word "server" associated with them in some fashion. From that view, anything that gets rid of those pesky "servers" sounds like a win.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#152

Post by danenania »

imafish wrote: post #49

My understanding of serverless = easily scalable, managed service. But somehow the word annoys people. Maybe we should find a better word?

For me, serverless is not just "easy" scaling or a managed service, but completely automatic and elastic scaling with metered billing. If you can go from 1 to millions of requests without touching your infrastructure or dropping requests, then that's serverless. If you have to provision larger instances or even wait 10 minutes for your autoscaling policy to spin up new VMs so you can serve those requests, then it's not.

Some services labelled serverless really do reach very close to this ideal (S3, for instance), while others fall short in various ways. "Serverless" Aurora, for example, can't scale writes beyond a single instance, so while it can take you quite far (a 96 core db instance can handle a lot of writes), past a certain point it's no longer really serverless anymore since you'll have to figure out some kind of sharding strategy to keep scaling writes. With S3 or DynamoDB, this doesn't happen. While even those services do have some sanity check limitations, they can scale seamlessly up to the point where you start to approach the scale of AWS itself.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#153

Post by matt2000 »

squarefoot wrote: post #100
oldgradstudent wrote: post #23

> Of those that are serverless, SQLite is the only one known to this author that allows multiple applications to access the same database at the same time. IIRC, MS Access allowed that, which explained a lot of its popularity.

In the old days of DOS I could do that with Clipper 5.2. Two or more PCs using Netbios shared directories could work on the same database, provided that they wouldn't write to the same record. That wasn't a problem because the environment (can't recall for sure if it was Clipper or an external library) allowed single record locking, so I enclosed the lock attempt into a timed spinlock-like block which attempted once…

This is the first time I've heard Clipper mentioned in a looong time. I was just talking the other day how useful it was in those days that there were tools that included the database and UI all in one. Everything was a bit easier because the language assumed a database, rather than just using a library to interface with one.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#154

Post by XelNika »

manigandham wrote: post #47
XelNika wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to know who uses "serverless" instead of "in-process". Why add a new term at all? "In-process" is meaningless to non-IT people, they don't even know what a process is. The SQLite dev probably created the term for marketing purposes, i.e. the exact same reason cloud providers adopted it 10 years later. > And if the definition has since been muddied, then all the more reason to avoid using it instead of…

SQLite is meaningless to non-IT people.

Non-IT people make IT decisions all the time. If you can sell your IT product to C-levels, they'll force IT to use it. Look at how companies misuse things like blockchain, ML and AI just because of the hype around those words.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#155

Post by giancarlostoro »

Frost1x wrote: post #151
giancarlostoro wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make it persist if you have it uploaded somewhere. But then I guess thats not serverless.

"Serverless" is a garbage marketing term in general. It sounds sexy to nontechnical management folks who are used to hearing a bunch of expensive costs and the word "server" associated with them in some fashion. From that view, anything that gets rid of those pesky "servers" sounds like a win.

It is, I did Azure Functions which is their "serverless" solution. It's either a type of CGI 'trigger' which is not as impressive however, another 'function' can be triggered based on Database actions or file uploads in their Blob Storage. So it's just handy if you're all in on Azure, and probably other clouds because you can have code run immediately when events happen for certain services. Outside of that, I find it wasteful.

The other buzzword is microservices. I was working a gig that involved running like 10 on a MBP with 16GB of RAM and it froze up the laptop. Java is not a language for micro anything, at least not in regards to memory. Was fun but dreadful to work with more than 3 local services at once. The creators of the framework suggested to mock services, but it was just messy to do that too.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#156

Post by lucideer »

bane wrote: post #149

I love SQLite, but people approach it from a classic RDBMS angle which confuses them. Here's the deal: SQLite is a file format with a nice API that uses SQL as the paradigm for reading/writing to the file. That's it. Stop overthinking it. Can you write a microservice that stores its data in a big JSON file that you've built some code around to read/write to? Yes. It's just a file, but you have to build all the read/w…

I'm not sure I understand your comment. What's the signifigance of it being "just a file format"?

What are the aspects of "approaching it from a classic RDBMS angle" that are incompatible with it being "just a file format"?

I've always seen it as "just a file format" myself, and I think I've always approached it "from a classic RDBMS angle", but I've never felt confused, and I don't see what I'm overcomplicating.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#157

Post by JyB »

geokon wrote: post #24

a bit tangential, but when do you move form using in-application data structures (maps, trees, vector/arrays) to using a database? Is it basically when the data doesn't fit in memory? I've been programming for almost a decade and I've never come across needing a database... (for context, it's ten years without anything web related) I'm interested in them and I'd love to learn SQL but I can't even think of a use case…

That's a weird question, I don't really understand.

When you want to persist data beyond the lifespan of your process?

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#158

Post by ComputerGuru »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #144
aikah wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this mean that you can hack some database storage (w/ sqlite) together on frontend only hosting platforms like Github or Netlify? You can run SQLlite in the client via webassembly therefore open a SQLite file in the browser to query it yes, you just can't write anything in it and expect it to persist somehow on the static hosting service itself. > The best I came up with: let's say you have a toy project, and…

You could make it persist if you have it uploaded somewhere. But then I guess thats not serverless.

I’ve done that, by persisting to an S3 backend.. but there’s no concurrent access and it is all one big race condition.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#159

Post by jtms »

Frost1x wrote: post #151
giancarlostoro wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make it persist if you have it uploaded somewhere. But then I guess thats not serverless.

"Serverless" is a garbage marketing term in general. It sounds sexy to nontechnical management folks who are used to hearing a bunch of expensive costs and the word "server" associated with them in some fashion. From that view, anything that gets rid of those pesky "servers" sounds like a win.

This is overly reductive. “Serverless” might be overhyped, but amongst devs and ops it is a perfectly good way to succinctly describe a very specific architecture with real merit. Paying for exactly the compute time i use is pretty sexy to me when I want to deploy and scale a side project.

Re: SQLite Is Serverless

#160

Post by giancarlostoro »

jtms wrote: post #159
Frost1x wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Serverless" is a garbage marketing term in general. It sounds sexy to nontechnical management folks who are used to hearing a bunch of expensive costs and the word "server" associated with them in some fashion. From that view, anything that gets rid of those pesky "servers" sounds like a win.

This is overly reductive. “Serverless” might be overhyped, but amongst devs and ops it is a perfectly good way to succinctly describe a very specific architecture with real merit. Paying for exactly the compute time i use is pretty sexy to me when I want to deploy and scale a side project.

Agreed, I'm not big in devops, but I can see the usefulness of it if you're already part of a cloud provider, but like I said I only know of the capabilities of it in Azure, I'm not familiar with the capabilities elsewhere.
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