Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite
Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite
Some of the interesting and insane facts I learned about SQLite
There are over 600 lines of test code for every line of code in SQLite
Holy mother of god
And they still find new bugs
I get it...I've never been the maintainer of a codebase that's deployed on trillions of devices, and backwards compatibility is something to be taken seriously and responsibly when you're that prolific. I do not begrudge SQLite or any large projects when they make decisions in service to that.
However
It always makes me feel oddly icky when known bugs (particularly of the footgun variety) become the new standard that the project intentionally upholds.
I'm so confused that the same people can say "why does everyone get their undies in a bunch that we happily accept putting arbitrary data in columns regardless of type, that's good, it's flexible, but fine, we'll put in a 'strict' keyword if you really want column types to mean something" and also "every other SQL says 1=='1' but this is madness, strings aren't integers, what is everyone else thinking?!"
It's not on trillions of devices, just billions. But e.g. a typical android phone has 1000s of sqlite db's for different purposes.
I had no idea the maintainers of sqlite were religious fanatics.
As long as they don't go on a holy crusade or forcefully evangelize the entire world by genocide I wouldn't call them fanatics.
another one not mentioned there: sqlite is really tiny: (from https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q18 )
The default configuration of SQLite only supports case-insensitive comparisons of ASCII characters. The reason for this is that doing full Unicode case-insensitive comparisons and case conversions requires tables and logic that would nearly double the size of the SQLite library.
Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”
Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.
Hmm, well... I have never murdered anyone, not even once! Is that good enough for their Code of Ethics?
So nerdy, so good
Here's a fun fact not noted in the article: Temporary files in sqlite are named etilqs_something in order to prevent people from contacting the sqlite developers for support when other applications (specifically, McAfee) have decided dump and not prune temp files.
Source: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/95f6df5b8d55e67d1e34d2bff217305a2f21b1fb/src/os.h#L57
Their commitment to backwards compatibility, to the point of keeping a known bug that allows primary keys to be null, is both amazing and "wtf".
You can do backwards compatibility and make breaking changes to fix bugs. All you need is an opt-in "target version". CMake and Android are good examples of this.