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

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

Troubleshooting the ps3 wireless network connection, including error 80130128

My father got a ps3 for Christmas, but ran into some problems getting it on his wireless network. The first one was "connection error 80130128" after configuring it to use DHCP. I couldn't google anything useful about this; just a few other hapless victims asking if anyone had any ideas. Fortunately Dad had his laptop there too and noticed Windows complaining that two machines on the network were both using the same IP. So, over the phone, I walked him through setting up the ps3 with a static address: on his laptop, run -> cmd ipconfig Read the "gateway" ip. Put that into his browser to go to his router's admin page Find the DHCP settings for his router to see what range of IPs it hands out; pick one outside that range Set up the ps3 with that IP, the router IP as primary dns, and an opendns server as secondary This made the connection test happy. But when he tried to go to the playstation store, it gave a DNS error. If he repeated the connection te...
7 comments
Read more

A review of 6 Python IDEs

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren...
36 comments
Read more