We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
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Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#2> we’re read-heavy and write-light
> we have almost no indices, no principled denormalization
Sounds like an easy win. People are probably suggesting a database switch because they're finding issues with the current speed, but they're not using their current database to its full potential yet.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#3I was unfamiliar with this project and assumed it was a hosted service at first. Not so, this is a local application, so an embedded database makes sense.
It took until the very last paragraph for the blog post to make that point.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#4I was unfamiliar with this project and assumed it was a hosted service at first. Not so, this is a local application, so an embedded database makes sense. It took until the very last paragraph for the blog post to make that point.
FWIW, I've run SQLite in a few production sites (low 6 figure pageviews per month) and it has worked fantastically. If you understand and work with the limitations, it really is amazing how much you can get out of it.
I'm actually surprised WordPress hasn't ever moved over to it for ease of installation/deployment - WordPress and PHP seem more likely to trip over in most deployments I've seen before SQLite would.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#5I was unfamiliar with this project and assumed it was a hosted service at first. Not so, this is a local application, so an embedded database makes sense. It took until the very last paragraph for the blog post to make that point.
Thanks; I've added a phrase to the intro section to mention that beets is a desktop app.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#6I'm a long time user and lover of SQLite, since way back when. Use it in a lot of our projects (web and Win32) that require local databases for logging etc.
Sure for larger or concurrent user access to a db, we use other databases, but nothing beats the 'zero footprint' install of SQLite. I even enjoyed the fact that earlier versions of SQLite forced me to think optimise my queries due to the lack of nested SELECTs.
SQLite still kind of reminds me of my early days in MySQL. I was recently trying to downgrade MySQL 5.7 to 5.6 after a slew of issues, which forced me to reminisce about how simple things used to be when MySQL was a lot like SQLite still is now...
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#7> we’re read-heavy and write-light > we have almost no indices, no principled denormalization Sounds like an easy win. People are probably suggesting a database switch because they're finding issues with the current speed, but they're not using their current database to its full potential yet.
Is the bottleneck even the database in the first place? From the article, that doesn't seem to be the case:
> The main case when beets writes to its database is on import, and import performance is dominated by I/O to the network and to music files.
Small file I/O is universally slow, even on SSDs, and if you're hitting rate-limited MusicBrainz servers for each file, database performance is almost irrelevant.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#8I was unfamiliar with this project and assumed it was a hosted service at first. Not so, this is a local application, so an embedded database makes sense. It took until the very last paragraph for the blog post to make that point.
FWIW, I've run SQLite in a few production sites (low 6 figure pageviews per month) and it has worked fantastically. If you understand and work with the limitations, it really is amazing how much you can get out of it. I'm actually surprised WordPress hasn't ever moved over to it for ease of installation/deployment - WordPress and PHP seem more likely to trip over in most deployments I've seen before SQLite would.
Two questions:
Wouldn't a "full" RDBMS like Mysql/Postgres offer a ton of benefits over SQLite (like the features to handle edge cases as they arise) to the point where, even if SQLite would work, SQLite still wouldn't be the ideal choice?
Does wordpress completely abstract the database or do third-party plugins use their own interfaces to the database, in which case a migration to SQLite would break a lot of them?
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#9SQLite also does remarkably well with recovering from all manner of power loss / crashes / worst case scenarios. We created a "power loss" rig just to test this facility for one particular system. Really SQLite's biggest weakness is concurrency, and if your app needs that in any serious amount you probably ought to look elsewhere. If you're just dealing with occasional concurrency though SQLite shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
Re: We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS
#10I can't blame them. I've been a huge fan of SQLite for years. Anytime I need storage it's my default choice unless there is a specific reason to use something else.
Another nice advantage of it is if you are distributing something that requires a small dataset[0][1]. If I give you both the code and the data already imported into a sqlite database, then you can use the code right away, or you can dump the data to a different database very easily.