SQLite as a Document Database (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: SQLite as a Document Database (2020)

#61

Post by bbkane » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #51

bbkane wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great thing about using a package manager is that it also handles updating and uninstalling software, not just the initial install

Sure, but the point is (1) that you don’t need a package manager to install software, which the comment I replied to seemed to assume, and (2) that for something you’re developing against like SQLite, installing it via package manager really isn’t that important. It doesn’t need to integrate with the rest of your system the way typical apps might. What seems to be happening here is that people have learned that packa…

Even for a personal project such as the one in the blog post, I'd still rather use a package manager to install SQLite.

It's POSSIBLE to build it from source, and manually re-download the source and C compiler (and any dependencies, though I'm not sure SQLite has any) when I want to update and instruct any collaborators to do the same thing... But I'd still rather automate it all with a package manager.

Especially because I'm probably also handling other dependencies in the project and I value the uniform simplicity of using a package manager for all of them

Re: SQLite as a Document Database (2020)

#62

Post by Hendrikto » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:39 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #24

alterom wrote: post #15

A long time ago, I wrote an ORM to serialize/deserialize object data seamlessly into SQLite, with massive arrays of floats being stored as blobs. In code, I could effectively mark which class members need to be stored/restored, and optionally provide a custom serialization function for them if needed. The latter was effectively never necessary, because all the bases types and multi-dimensional arrays were handled by…

Did it end up becoming more painful than just writing the SQL?

It almost always does. People put so much effort into building layers of abstractions to avoid using SQL, while just writing it directly would be much faster, easier, more readable, easier to maintain, modify, and debug. I do not get it.

Re: SQLite as a Document Database (2020)

#63

Post by Hendrikto » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:42 AM UTC

conception wrote: post #38

Since sqlite people are probably in this thread - why is storing genomic data as a sqlite tar with all the metadata you want in tables a “Bad Idea” (tm)? Like toss a fastq or bam plus all the downstream data, grant info, experiment parameters, specimen info etc etc in a single file easily parsable.

https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

It is not a bad idea. It is a very flexible and stable format.