I was pleasantly surprised recently when planning to "upgrade" a light web app to be portable between SQLite and DuckDB, and the LLM I was working with really made the case that SQLite is better if concurrent operations were to occur.
How SQLite is tested
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Re: How SQLite is tested
#12What is the story with Fossil? Is it used outside of Sqlite?
Re: How SQLite is tested
#13Always makes me a bit envious as well as awestruck. What a joy it must be in a lot of ways to be able to grind and perfect a piece of software like this. Truly a work of craftsmanship.
You can literally just do this. I’ve never gotten fired from a software engineering job for moving slower and building things that work well, work predictably, and are built to last.
Over a career of working at it, you get dramatically better at higher levels of quality even in earlier passes, so the same level of added effort provides increasing levels of reward as you gain experience.
Nobody ever complains about the person who’s leaving everything they touch a little cleaner than how they found it.
Re: How SQLite is tested
#14Interesting, TH3 is proprietary.
Re: How SQLite is tested
#15What is the story with Fossil? Is it used outside of Sqlite?
I can't answer that but it's a great thing that an entire Fossil repo lives in a single sqlite file.
Re: How SQLite is tested
#16What is the story with Fossil? Is it used outside of Sqlite?
SQLite & Fossil* were created by same person (once a member of Tcl Core Team). Fossil few years after SQLite (was on CVS before). A rationale is given in: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html. The one other big project using it is Tcl/Tk. (Can say Tcl x SQLite x Fossil form a trinity of sorts with one using the others.)
*The homepage is available in: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki.
Re: How SQLite is tested
#17This looks so very cool, and so then all the more thought provoking that the tests themselves are closed-source, unlike the rest of the codebase. In this evolving world of rapidly improving llm coding agent productivity, the idea that the tests are more important than the implementation starts to ring true. I was thinking about sqlite's test landscape as described here, in relation to simonw's recent writing about po…
It's made a lot of sense in general if you think about the business models around open source products. An extensive test suite gives you the ability to engineer changes effectively and efficiently, meaning that you can also add additional value on top of released versions better than everyone else.
Re: How SQLite is tested
#18Perhaps someone in the know can answer this: How reliable is SQLite at retaining data integrity and avoiding data corruption, compared to say, flat text files?
Re: How SQLite is tested
#19Over a decade ago, the maintainer of SQLite gave a talk at OSCON about their testing practices. One concept that stood out to me was the power of checklists, the same tool pilots rely on before every flight. He also mentioned Doctors Without Borders, who weren't seeing the outcomes they expected when it came to saving lives. One surprising reason? The medical teams often didn't speak the same language or even know ea…
A lot of these seem to be potentially automated - why aren’t they? Anyone know?
Re: How SQLite is tested
#20... very thoroughly is the answer
What a superb piece of software SQLite is.
Install and forget.