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Rails on SQLite: new ways to cause outages

194 points by ingve

by polyrand

2 subcomments

A bit off topic but:

  The reason for the "lite" in the name is that it doesn’t run a separate process, it doesn’t listen on a port or a socket, and you can’t connect to it.

The name doesn't really contain "lite". It's SQL-ite. So the suffix is "ite":

  The suffix "ite" is derived from the Greek word lithos (from its adjectival form -ites), meaning rock or stone [0]

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/34010

by nikodunk

4 subcomments

Very well written and reasoned article. I’ve struggled with a lot of the same issues with SQLite prod deployments. They appear simple, but then after you’ve ensured your file is on non-ephemeral storage, sorted out backups, and thought about vertical scaling or having separate dbs for jobs and models, a lot of the benefits over psql disappear IMO.
The main benefit over psql of course being that you don’t need to pay for a hosted db like RDS, or have a separate database server.
I’ve found a happy middle ground in simply self-hosting psql and my apps on the same VPS with something like dokploy. Local development is still easy enough, and remote deployment in containers is 1-click with Dokploy, and ends up being simpler to reason about IMO. My take below, if anyone’s interested.
https://nikodunk.com/2025-06-10-diy-serverless-(coreos-+-dok...

by jemmyw

7 subcomments

I don't really understand the current trend of using sqlite in place of a traditional database. It has it's place, I use it in a client side project and it's really great, although even there I have to be aware of the one writer only limitation.
20 years ago it was MySQL and now it's usually postgres, and these are both still fine. Easier than ever to get setup and going in production. Outside of quite niche needs, I can't understand why one would put up with the pain of using sqlite. Plus it's setting up an even more painful migration later if you do grow.

by flakeoil

1 subcomments

The author of the article says he could not have implemented the app without SQLite, but nowhere in the article does he explain why he could do it with SQLite and not with MySQL/PostgreSQL.
> Feed Your Email is only possible as a service because of SQLite—if I had to maintain three Postgres instances and a couple of web instances and a couple of worker instances, I would have felt like it was too much hassle and cost too much money, and given up.
What's the issue to run MySQL instead and all on one server? You can do it for $5-10 on a Hetzner server.

by richjdsmith

1 subcomments

Switching all my projects from psql to SQLite was a bit of a PITA but has absolutely been worth it. Keeping with the “do it the rails way” has kept mental overhead low, and seems to jive well with using LLMs.

by pawelduda

3 subcomments

So that's the new default for Rails? Seems like a new way for people to shot themselves in foot, for those who are used to the usual postgres + separate services setup. Especially that it's advertised as simpler and therefore is tempting to try out without considering such edge cases. I mean, it's the usual route (from my experience) for successful Rails apps to scale horizontally

by giveita

0 subcomment

> I’ve been deploying Rails applications to production since 2004
> I was still caught out by some of the ways things are different.
I feel this is the problem with frameworks, they have to keep evolving and growing and even people who have been doing it 20 years can get caught out.
But the architecture of the Web has basically not changed that much. We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
Definitely not just a Rails thing.

by phamilton

2 subcomments

I'm sad this project fizzled: https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite
It had the fascinating property of being a full multi-writer SQL engine when using Page Level Conflict Checking. Even more fascinating: every single client itself becomes a writer.

by dismalaf

0 subcomment

Weird title, the bulk of the article talked about the same stuff various Rails/SQLite talks have mentioned, the positivity at the end is nice I guess.
The real nice thing about SQLite in prod though is how much it simplifies development and deployment. Let's be real, a lot of apps people build are relatively small, basic CRUD apps that see modest usage or are even internal-only, SQLite is perfect for that. And SQLite can scale reasonably well on modern hardware. It follows the premise of Rails quite nicely: it gets you up and running, scaling to the point you're making a decent amount of money and then you can figure out how to scale beyond that, if you need to.

by tlaverdure

1 subcomments

> Another implication of having just one single server: there is only one place for network requests to go.
> In the dream SQLite plus LiteFS world, you have all the advantages of SQLite and all the advantages of a fully replicated multi-writer database setup. Any individual server can go down without causing any downtime for the application as a whole, and every user has a full copy of the application and all its data, running extremely close to them.
These are some of the problems I’m working on solving with Litebase (alpha), which runs on SQLite and distributed storage. Most SQLite solutions rely on replicating data between nodes, but I’m taking a simpler approach by using distributed storage for durability, availability, and replication, combined with a lightweight consensus system between primary and replica nodes.
https://litebase.com
I’m working on getting a public alpha ready, but you can check out the project so far. I’ll create a thread on Hacker News once things are ready.

by hansmayer

0 subcomment

Yay! The SQLite posts are back :)

by decasia

2 subcomments

I have a toy web application that accepts a very, very low rate of writes. It's almost all reads.
It is implemented like this:
- The front end uses react to draw a UI.
- It fetches data from a JSON file stored on S3.
- When we get a write request, a lamdba function reads the JSON file, parses it, adds new data, and writes back to S3.
The main selling point for me is that almost all of it is static assets, which are cheap and simple to host, and the tiny bit of "back end" logic is just one nodejs function.
The previous implementation used SQLite and a golang back end, but I eventually got tired of having to maintain a virtual machine to host it.

by curtisszmania

0 subcomment

[dead]

by SchwKatze

0 subcomment

Just use Turso

by wewewedxfgdf

1 subcomments

I really don't get the "use sqlite in production" thing.
What about all the important things you need in a database such as multiuser/remote access and other such things?
What do the "sqlite in production" people do when they need to examine the database/resolve an issue/do development? Also what about the limitations of sqlite in modifying database structure?