Why We Moved Our Internal Apps to SQLite
We migrated our staging and internal tools to SQLite and everything is fine.
We recently made a big change on how we run our infrastructure. We moved all of our internal apps and staging servers to one incredibly simple tool: SQLite3.
The only exception is our financial apps. When handling money, we still use the big guns you know Postgres for obvious reasons. But for everything else, we decided it was time, drop the expensive servers, and keep things simple. and boy; watch how easy it is to spin up something new. (...well we will probably shut down next week).
Well this started off mid-last year as experiment for staging envs, but some few projects in we discovered those apps run just fine; and for our context - Cameroon; a lot of apps will run perfectly fine on this with no issues at all); If your app isn't doing more than 500K hits per day or you not a bank; you have no business picking the other guys right out of the box.
The tech world has a bad habit of over-complicating things. Developers often reach for the heavy PostgreSQL & MySQL by default, even for apps that only a few staff members use. We realized we were falling into this trap, wasting time and money on big server databases when a single, fast file could do the exact same job. The truth is, we do not need much to build great stuff.
SQLite is not just toy for small hobby projects though. It is actually the most used database engine in the entire world.
Think about your iPhone. Every iPhone natively uses SQLite for almost everything it does from your messages to your contacts. But here's the fact; your iPhone is far more stable and reliable than most 'big' companies in our ecosystem. If it is strong enough to run the devices in our pockets flawlessly without ever crashing; so we think it is more than enough run our internal company apps.
Like i said above; the reality check: if your database gets less than 500,000 hits a day, you have no business using a heavy database.
For everyday internal apps and medium-traffic sites, SQLite is incredibly fast and more than enough. You do not have to worry about the 'database bottleneck' because, for the vast majority of projects, that bottleneck is a complete myth.
'But desgnspace guys, if i eventually get to use mysql/postgres, won't i have to rewrite queries as sql commands are not always the same for all those engines" - Well you're right but between me and you now, we know you're using an ORM, so the switch should be fine; and those different commands that differ are often not that much.
Anyway, We plan to explore this for bigger projects in production - We might even share some fancy charts with you. Till then...