Field Notes

D.Richard Hipp is the creator of SQLite. I met him at the speakers' dinner at SELinuxfest, attended his session on Saturday, and had a couple of conversations with him as well. He has a very friendly attitude to Postgres. He told me that whenever people ask him why he doesn't put more server class features into his product, he tells them that creating such a product has already been done, and it's called Postgres. In fact, he originally worked from Postgres documentation when he was creating SQLite.

Another thing he told me is that the large test suite he uses to test a number of databases besides his own crashes or gives incorrect results on every other database but one: Postgres.

SQLite is what I advise people to use when they want a simple embedded database. It also works well in my experience for small web sites. And its 'zero admin' nature makes it a good initial prototyping tool, too. I don't see it competing in the same space as Postgres, which has a very much richer set of features, scales better, and can handle much larger volumes of data. So to me we are not really competitors - we are more complementary than competing. I recently set up a very low volume web site for a fami;y member's business. SQLite worked well with the web framework software I was using and I was quite happy to use it.

Richard's talk was largely about the "new generation" databases. He doesn't like the term "NoSQL" much. He proposes instead that we call them "Postmodern Databases", in part because they have no notion of objective truth

Baron Schwartz of Percona had a somewhat different perspective, but many of his conclusions seemed to tend in the same direction. People should not lightly abandon the single server model of processing, he advised, and I think he's right.

I shuddered rather at Baron's description of MySQL's replication facilities, especially the lack of conflict detection and resolution. It reminded me a bit of David Sedaris' attitude to European style Christmases: "It's nothing I'd want for myself."

At the beginning of his session, he asked me if my presence indicated I was about to switch camps. I told him no, I was spying out the opposition Of course, we are all friendly, and not at daggers drawn.