Simon Willison’s Weblog

Performance analysis indicates that SQLite spends very little time doing bytecode decoding and dispatch. Most CPU cycles are consumed in walking B-Trees, doing value comparisons, and decoding records—all of which happens in compiled C code. Bytecode dispatch is using less than 3% of the total CPU time, according to my measurements.

So at least in the case of SQLite, compiling all the way down to machine code might provide a performance boost 3% or less. That’s not very much, considering the size, complexity, and portability costs involved.

— D. Richard Hipp # 30th April 2024, 1:59 pm

We [Bluesky] took a somewhat novel approach of giving every user their own SQLite database. By removing the Postgres dependency, we made it possible to run a ‘PDS in a box’ [Personal Data Server] without having to worry about managing a database. We didn’t have to worry about things like replicas or failover. For those thinking this is irresponsible: don’t worry, we are backing up all the data on our PDSs!

SQLite worked really well because the PDS – in its ideal form – is a single-tenant system. We owned up to that by having these single tenant SQLite databases.

— Daniel Holmgren # 23rd April 2024, 7 pm