SQLite: Breathing a Breath of Fresh Air into SQL
For the last year and a bit, I have been meaning to try out SQLite. Today I eventually got around to doing it. To say the least, I'm amazed.
Database administration is, in my opinion pretty boring. Installing the app, configuring users, setting permissions, creating the database and all of the rest takes time, and tools to do it aren't particularly user friendly. SQLite is rather different.
It is comparable, in the very loose sense of using MSSQL to an Access database. One is centralised and the other is stored as a specifically run system. With MySQL you have to communicate with the MySQL daemon to access the database, with SQLite it is entirely dealt with as a flat file.
This means that there is no complex setup to go around to get up and running, permissions are dealt with by the operating system and it's much easier to backup. Because of the lack of complexity, it's much faster out of the box too. Which, lets be honest, you didn't really optimise MySQL, did you?
I can say that I have been converted, and will from now on be using it. Now, to work out how to move my blog over to it...
Setup
Installing SQLite is dependant on your OS, of course, but in Apple's Leopard Server, it is preinstalled.
The latest release, being SQLite3, is easy to test for your install by doing the following:
sqlite3
.exit to get out of it. If it responds with a bad command, you don't have it installed.
Conventions
As SQLite is a flat file instead of a complex application setup, it is much easier to use. Once it is installed, it is accessed by using the full file. For example:
/var/www/sqlite/database
Once you start using it, you forget about the times where you had to create the database, create a user, assign
October 5 @ 07:48 PM | 0 Comments