Skip to main content

Sqlite sucks

I'm losing patience with sqlite. I've been working on Spyce examples using postgresql, but now that I'm getting close to releasing Spyce 2.1, I figured I'd better convert the examples to use sqlite since that's such a no-brainer to set up.

It has been a frustrating experience.

Weird-assness I've run into includes

And I didn't think I was doing anything very complicated! My examples have three tables at most!

Really my overall impression is one of a "0.9" product at best. I'm amazed that so many people appear to use this festering pile of gotchas in production.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Don't forget NUMERIC (decimal) values are actually stored as REAL (binary) values...make sure your app can round-trip decimal.Decimal("1111.1111") (or fixedpoint, if you prefer).

And there's no DROP/RENAME COLUMN, no CREATE/DROP DATABASE, no date functions, no RIGHT JOIN, no nested JOINS, and *very* confusing differences between quoting with '', "", and []. Also, schema changes are bound to the database connection in which they are performed, which hampers database connection pooling.

Just a few from scrounging my code. ;)
1:36 PM
Anonymous said…
Having said just this morning, "SQLite rocks", I was a little surprised to see "SQLite sucks" appear in my aggregator. :)

You're right, of course - SQLite has gotchas. Robert has pointed out a bunch more. I would hate to write an application that only targeted SQLite, as you would have to program in application code a lot of functionality that should be provided by the database.

That being said, I haven't seen a good alternative for administration-less embedded databases yet.
2:21 PM
Anonymous said…
You can get the columnn default, among other things, using

pragma table_info('tablename')

which you can call use like any other SQL query.

Really this is all rather churlish. We're talking about an under 200K download here. I'm amazed that sqlite can do as much as it does.
2:26 PM
Anonymous said…
About INT vs INTEGER. Is a documented feature. See: http://www.sqlite.org/datatypes.html and http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html
2:34 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
Anonymous: I believe I said _useful_ default info. If you have, for instance, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as a default, table_info will report the default is "2006-08-01 00:59:26". A few seconds later it will report "2006-08-01 00:59:26."

I'm okay with features that are legitimately missing and documented as such. It's features that should work, but don't, that piss me off. Especially in something that holds my data.
6:04 PM
Anonymous said…
Here are step-by-step instructions on using Firebird in embedded mode with Python.
10:21 AM
Simon said…
If you've got a JVM handy, have a look at Derby http://db.apache.org/derby/
3:19 AM
Anonymous said…
If you need column renaming you can use the graphical browser: http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/
8:44 AM
Wyatt said…
I took a look at sqlitebrowser. It had a problem renaming a column because of a multi-column primary key (or something like that). And the interface is... not very pleasant. And... it doesn't help if you're trying to do something programmatically (like I'm trying to do right now with sqlalchemy-migrate).
4:33 PM
Jack Dowson said…
A framework frameworks engineer regulates the designing, business, and the board portions of a task or a framework. These experts guarantee that every one of the parts appropriately cooperate. A framework foundation engineer is engaged with the "master plan" of a venture and designing viewpoints. They consider subtleties, for example, expenses and timetables connected with a venture>> engineer infrastructure
2:30 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...
43 comments
Read more