Interesting idea - I like seeing a list of pet-peeves followed by a proposal for a straightforward way to have a set of 'alternative defaults' that remains backwards compatible. If you don't want to opt in, don't run the new PRAGMA edition = 2026.
Too often it's just a list of issues and a wish that everyone else will change.
In (mild) defense of SQLITE_BUSY - busy_timeout just tells sqlite to sleep and retry up to the timeout when it receives SQLITE_BUSY. It seems like a sensible default for a library to leave that up the calling code - which may have something else it could do while it waits. However, that logic often gets missed!
This isn't so much a list of pet peeves as it is the almost universal way people that work seriously with SQLite configure the database. It's reasonable to suggest that the alternative settings for each of these suggestions is probably the wrong default for 2026.
> It's reasonable to suggest that the alternative settings for each of these suggestions is probably the wrong default for 2026.
That's the key concept here. When tightening up the defaults, an "edition" mechanism is a good solution.
Now we need this for C/C++, which have much legacy stuff which ought to go away for new code. This is more feasible than it used to be, because "Convert this Edition 4 code to Edition 5" is something LLMs can do now.
I'd never seen all the rules for SQLite soft typing written out before. Those are more complicated than strong typing.
P1881 Epochs proposed to WG21 (the C++ standards committee) in 2019 by Vittorio Romeo
The committee found plenty of problems with this, and made it clear that if Vittorio did all the hard work to resolve those problems they would find more, P1881 was abandoned.
So, you're not the first person to notice that this is a good idea, P1881 was written after Rust's 2018 Edition, but before 2021 Edition with its even more significant improvements. I firmly believe Rust's Editions unlock not only technical possibilities (though it does certainly do that) it unlocks an appetite from users which is good for your ecosystem.
I’d say these are reasonable settings for most uses. Though do you know of surveys that back this up? I don’t mean to nit pick too much, I’d just like to see common uses and the data.
SQLite is used in a lot of unconventional settings (for SQL databases) where these settings don't make as much sense. But that's what makes the "edition" useful; it captures the use case we all mean when we're thinking of the "database" lego in an application stack.
While that's true, editions are more about leaving legacy decisions behind while keeping the backward compatibility promise.
Even if you're in one of those unconventional settings (say, a bare-metal microcontroller or something), you'd probably still start from edition 2026 and mutate your settings accordingly, rather than using the defaults that are 26 years old.
Yeah, that's important. Rust's 2015 edition is worse, not just different from what you'd write today with 2024 edition. There's a clear direction of travel.
You are probably correct, but I imagine the SQLite team's dedication to backwards compatibility has things the way they are so that existing systems can user later versions a swap without worrying about changing the SQL using it.
GPP's wording suggests that the defaults simply be changed to what is being discussed as more generally sensible in current times, rather than being opt-in.
Given how many projects are potentially out there effectively relying on the current settings, and SQLite's general attitude to backwards compatibility, that would likely not be considered a good idea. Opting in with an edition flag for new (or updating) projects does seem like a good solution to this to serve all of old, active, and new projects, but it would increase potential bug surface area and therefor testing requirements, and the existing setting do allow all that to be opted in/out to/from already (and it is only four settings we are talking about here).
That FKs being enforced is set per-connection rather than at the database level is something that surprised me a lot when I found out. A way of setting that at DB creation (or via ALTER DATABASE after) seems like quite an omission because if you have multiple potential routes that can update the same DB any one of them could cause serious the others will encounter.
The entire point of "SQLite should have editions" is so that projects can opt into a set of modern defaults for 2026 and not get all of those backwards compatible decisions from 20 years ago.
busy_timeout is often sidestepped (ignored) when a transaction attempts to upgrade from a read to a write producing SQLITE_BUSY.
By default, SQLite transactions start in DEFERRED mode, acting as read transactions until an actual write operation occurs.
If another connection begins writing to the database while your transaction is in this read state, an immediate SQLITE_BUSY error is triggered regardless of what you set busy_timeout to
Yep. The whole locking database thing is this persistent myth about SQLite. All databases lock on write, it’s a question of the granularity of the lock. Multiple writers simply take turns.
yes but no... most database allow for at least as many parallel and concurrent writes as there are tables at a minimum.
The "lock on write" problem is that in MySQL i could run a OLAP pipeline for a few hours and have a fully functioning database with degraded perfomance, on SQLite the same pipeline would lock the database for the full hour. (there are surely ways to solve this (eg using the main db as read-only and a secondary db for writes or splitting the writes in incremental transaction), but it is not a "myth".
The “myth” is you can’t use it for a website because if you have multiple requests that need to write they can’t do it concurrently. (They just take turns of course for the milliseconds of write time.)
If you run a transaction with writes for an hour on any database, the data you update will literally be locked. So your example only works if results are independent of the data other programs want to use.
Of course more granularity of locking is better and enables more designs that would not otherwise work. But somewhere you run into the same problem of writers taking turns.
After read, it hit me that because sqlite is a DB, "editions" as-is not work.
Because it not tied to the data but to the code.
Instead, what I think should be is that the PRAGMAs become "data" that is always checked in full with "if manually set" and then on next "open" THEY GET APPLIED.
That is.
(and in the command line when open interactively they show up).
RE: SQLITE_BUSY: I would replace "often" with "nearly always." On top of that, it's often not fixed even when pointed out. "This software only has one writer, so we don't need to handle SQLITE_BUSY" translates to me sending SIGSTOP to a process any time I want to run some queries against its database.
SQLite is slightly different from Rust in that it is a data container. It’s somewhat more common for people to move SQLite database files from one machine to another and then inspect using the command line tool. And it is often the case that the embedded SQLite version in your app is a newer version than whatever version /usr/bin/sqlite3 happens to be. Adding editions to your SQLite file will probably break this use case of using an older version to read a database written by a newer version because it does not know what has changed in a new edition.
Not a big deal though. Probably just need better ops to bundle the command-line utility that’s the same version as what’s used in your app.
For some of these pragmas you have the same issue with or without "editions", right? Busy timeout is per-connection. And then: if you're running in WAL mode, you, the user, have to know that, or risk messing up the database by copying just the .db file rather than vacuuming-into.
Editions make the problem worse by requiring the version not only to support the underlying pragmas but also to understand the edition mapping.
Example: PRAGMA foo=1 is introduced in 2027. PRAGMA edition=2030 implies this foo pragma. Now you unnecessarily lock out three years worth of releases.
There’s no need to store the literal edition in the DB file. Instead the edition could be a library construct that sets appropriate flags. So if you set edition 2026 you get WAL, etc.
I think you can maintain full backward compatibility with all these changes. SQLite has a bunch of meta-data that you can use to see that no earlier editions have modified your database since you last wrote. You make the new editions follow these strict rules, but if an old edition modifies the DB in the interim, you fall back to the original rules, until it’s verified compliant again.
editions could be self-describing as to certain semantic changes, and you could embed that with the file. older versions could safely ignore it and newer versions parse and run it. you could also force things like "editions must be declared early", "editions are one way only" etc to get some level of security in the adoption of the change
It seems SQLite could be evolve to solve this by just bundling itself entirely in the data files? After all, the binary is less than 1MB, anywhere you’re putting a database surely has at least that much overhead, for most applications it’s less than a drop in the bucket.
I’d be interested to learn if there are any db implementations that take this approach, or reasons this wouldn’t work.
There is a way to do this with sqlite in readonly mode using the append vfs [0] which allows you to put your DB appended to the end of the executable, and then the executable can read it (like a zip file the header is then at the end of the db rather than the front). Or you could embed a normal db as a binary blob with the linker. Allowing writes is more tricky because most OSes don't typically allow executables to edit their own executable memory (on unix I believe executables always load as r/x or r/o depending on the region, maybe with some minor exceptions).
And a lot of users of sqlite statically link sqlite within their executable, they actually recommend that instead of dynamically linking.
Well you'd have the problem that an sqlite database file created on a Linux AMD64 box could be copied to an AArch64 macOS machine to be read there. And quite a lot of (cross platform) software build their file formats on top of SQLite.
I think my silly and unserious naive response would be linear scaling bundled binaries with number of platforms doesn’t seem to be that materially different in terms of total size. But I see your point, didn’t consider the architectures
> SQLite is slightly different from Rust in that it is a data container.
I think this is the key.
From sqlite.org [1]:
> [Since 2004], the file format has been fully backwards compatible.
> By "backwards compatible" we mean that newer versions of SQLite can always read and write database files created by older versions of SQLite. It is often also the case that SQLite is "forwards compatible", that older versions of SQLite can read and write database files created by newer versions of SQLite. But there are sometimes forward compatibility breaks. Sometimes new features are added to the file format
---
Given editions (A) and (B), what does backwards compatibility look like? Must (B) be backwards compatible with (A)?
If yes -> editions are backwards compatible but not necessarily forwards compatible, which is the current status quo:
-------(A)----(B)--
If no -> editions are not backwards compatible, the edition space is bifurcated:
---+----(A)--------
\
\--(B)--------
Now you may have to worry about backwards compatibility with (A)..(Z). What happens when you import a file from edition (Y)?
The answer to the question "What happens when you import a file from edition (Y)" should, ideally, be exactly the same as the answer to the question "What happens when you import a file created with parameters foo, bar and baz set to values a, b and c". There's really nothing new here.
Some parameters are properties of the database file itself, such as (I believe) journal_mode. These parameters probably result in issues with earlier versions of sqlite; if you create a file with journal_mode WAL, you're not gonna be able to open it in a version of sqlite without WAL support. Same with strict tables; if you have a database which contains strict tables, I assume you're going to encounter issues if you try to open it in a version of sqlite too old to support strict tables. But anything new enough to support the individual database file features shouldn't have any trouble. This is true whether we're talking about an edition pragma or individual parameters set the old way.
Some parameters are properties of the connection, like the foreign_keys parameter. If you're trying to open a database file in a version of sqlite which doesn't support foreign key validation at all, just don't set the foreign_keys parameter.
> I don't think I need to explain why it's a bad idea for a database to be so careless about data validation.
Well, loose typing can be extremely useful, and having a type of "ANY" would not replace it.
I have built recently an accounting reconciliation system to find discrepancies in data coming from a large variety of sources: some from proper database engines (MySQL MariaDB), but most from proprietary systems that export to CSV. It's amazing how corrupt data can become: dates that are invalid, numbers that aren't numbers, strings strings strings everywhere.
Being able to store the data into tables that have types, but can accept anything, is simply great.
Are you saying that you have an application where you want the loose-typing-with-integer-affinity semantics for a column (or some other particular affinity)? It would be entirely reasonable to have a specific type for each loose-with-affinity variant. But I don’t think those should be the default.
"Loose typing" enforced in a strict typing system can be useful in certain scenarios, but it is regrettable that it instead replaced the strict typing discipline for some time in software. Strict typing should be the default, because it is the most accurate description of data in the vast majority of cases.
The "use strict" thing is interesting. I often hear people say, well we can't fix absurd behavior in JS because backwards compatibility! Well, we already did, and we can do it again!
Brilliant. I have a similar idea for a language I've been envisioning.
So, my approach to dynamic features, global mutable state, etc... There's this big list of features which have caused me tremendous pain over the years. I am increasingly weary.
Sometimes you want or need them, though. You don't want the same level of strictness for every project (e.g. throwaway scripts or game jams), nor at every stage of a project -- e.g. being forced to specify invariants is something I'd love to be able to enable, but I wouldn't want that on while I'm still figuring out the basic structure of things.
So for game jams I'd put the language into #JAMMODE (which would be short for a bunch of other flags). But the point here is that jam mode should be opt-in, rather than opt-out. You should have to go out of your way to enable the footguns. And a file with #JAMMODE should be a little smelly. You should think, OK I'm actually shipping this thing now, let's get it out of #JAMMODE. (And strict files can't talk to jam files, and we probably want different strictness levels beyond Debug and Release, etc... someone told me with the strictness "zones" that I'm reinventing half of Ada, hahah.)
I became hopeful for a moment, then saw it's from 2015. Ouch! (Also, I love the name. I had a similar idea I called "use sane", but obviously that one wouldn't have gotten far...)
The strong typing thing is really interesting. After using JavaScript for a while, I developed PTSD around dynamic types. I became convinced that static typing was the only way to avoid hell.
Then I used Python for a while, and... experienced approximately none of my previous pain. I found that quite odd. Turns out what I was actually after was a sane type system, not a static one. In other words, strong types rather than weak ones.
I do think there are additional benefits to static typing, especially for larger projects and serious work. But I was surprised that most of the pain-delta was in this first jump:
Oh I really like this! The one counterargument that comes to mind is when I think about the likes of C++, where there are many editions and they can be confusing to keep track of.
I'm not sure if you'd want to set one edition in stone every year. Perhaps every 3 years? Or 5 years? Especially for a long-term project like SQLite, that sounds perfectly acceptable!
Found what appears to be a minor mistake you may want to fix: "This means that a dangling reference easily results in a reference to the wrong column" should probably be "... a reference to the wrong row". (In the paragraph about SQLite's tendency to re-use ROWIDs).
Suggestion: post this on https://sqlite.org/forum/forum - the SQLite team monitor that forum closely and I've had some really great answers from them to questions or suggestions in the past.
I haven't really ever participated in that forum before, but it's an interesting idea. I don't know if I'm going to do it, I might. Though I also wouldn't mind if someone else posted about it there. I might even make a forum account and participate in the discussion.
That's correct but SQLite was never designed to be a production database in the first place. It can be used as a production database but only if you know what you're doing, and presumably anyone who knows what they're doing knows about the AUTOINCREMENT keyword because it's one of the first things you learn about SQLite.
> The normal ROWID selection algorithm described above will generate monotonically increasing unique ROWIDs as long as you never use the maximum ROWID value and you never delete the entry in the table with the largest ROWID. If you ever delete rows or if you ever create a row with the maximum possible ROWID, then ROWIDs from previously deleted rows might be reused when creating new rows and newly created ROWIDs might not be in strictly ascending order.
I don’t think people are criticizing the MAXINT thing. The problem is that IDs are already reused when you create 10 rows, delete 5 and then make a new one. Normal DB engines just keep counting afaik so the new ID will still be one that has never been used before.
This changes one default that "everyone agrees about" and which you can change with a compile time option: SQLITE_DEFAULT_FOREIGN_KEYS
Then it argues for STRICT tables, recognizing that there are drawbacks without introducing a new feature (custom type aliases, CREATE TYPE alias = base).
If also doesn't even considering what it means for existing data to make tables strict, which is precisely why “there is no pragma to globally make all tables strict”.
Then it argues for setting a busy timeout, and picks 5s. Why? Why 5s and not 1 or 60s? SQLite doesn't decide, which makes perfect sense. Your OS or programming language also doesn't offer you locks with a default timeout: it's either indefinite, or an instant "try lock".
Finally: WAL mode is a different file format, unsupported on many platforms, in more danger of silent corruption. Why should it be the default?
The section "The solution: editions?" in the article addresses directly the point of existing data.
The way I read it, this article does not advocate at any point to change the defaults for existing databases, but rather to start with better defaults for new databases.
Also, regarding the timeout of 5 seconds, I disagree with your premise "SQLite doesn't decide, which makes perfect sense". As the article explains, SQLite decides on the value zero (ie. instant error), which is arguably an inconvenient default.
It might be worth bringing this up on the forum [1]. The developers are quite active there, and it's possible they've never considered this option, or they have considered it and have reasons to not go for it. The original design followed Postel's Law (see my comment from the other say [2]), it would (theoretically) be nice if that mess could be avoided by specifying an edition.
Today I noticed I could do `pragma foreign_key = ON`, and despite the pragma being wrong (it should be foreign_keys, plural), it reported nothing. In fact, it reports nothing with the correct pragma either. So check your pragmas!
I scarcely go a week without encountering issues caused by their huge CMake 4 backward compatibility break. I think CMake has one of the worst solutions out there.
Sadly, the ORM layer lags here: Drizzle has no way to declare STRICT tables. The request has been open since March 2023 (issue #202, now discussion #2435) and didn't make the v1.0 beta either. The only workaround is hand-appending STRICT to generated migration SQL, which doesn't work at all if you use `drizzle-kit push`.
been working on a new implementation entirely of a local sqlite like database. It's from scratch in rust and data is made up of TSV's so the data is human (and agent) readable. sql querying is more expensive for an llm
SQLite gets so much praise here but when you start using it, you realize quickly how bad it is, the type system is by default very limited and dangerous.
It's like comparing old php with a strongly typed language.
It’s curious how many people don’t understand what SQLite is and its intended feature set. They get huffy that it’s not a full client server model with multimaster clustering across 8 data centers on 12 continents plus New Zealand with realtime synchronous replication.
It’s a product that allows you to do sql like things without a database server. If you need to have database server behavior, you’re using the wrong product.
Well, it goes both ways. You'll see articles saying essentially "you don't need Postgres or any other fancy database, SQlite is enough" while ignoring the fact that some use-cases warrant a more conventional DB server.
I agree with you. There are 2 dozen foot-guns to be kept in mind. And discovered a new footgun regarding multi-byte strings and NUL handling today on HN. SQLite became popular because it was the only free and open-source choice 2 decades ago. Now there are other type-safe and robust choices.
It is very simple. Which means fast to setup in dev environment for local testing. Which makes first version very easy. And then people just keep fixing that one.
Still I quite a lot of question the use on servers if you have decided that I need a database.
Not that there isn't more valid use cases like local storage or self-contained information transfer for specific use.
From what I can tell, DuckDB is more focused on huge-scale data analysis than simple data persistence, so I’m not sure if it fits my use cases. Otherwise, it looks good.
It’s not as bad since you can always use a powerful programming language with a good type system that avoids type errors at the SQL level. You can build good abstractions in your programming language.
I think the solution is for author to use PostgreSQL
Those choices were made for specific reasons that make sense in embedded environment and when backward compatibility is no.1 concern.
But I wouldn't mind feature-sets. Editions are too wide of a concept and tell you nothing at glance what a given code is doing, "enable 2026 set of features" tells me nothing on what is actually enabled.
What are the specific reasons for why it makes sense in embedded systems to not enforce foreign key constraints or to let me insert a blob into an integer column? Because I work with embedded systems and have never found those defaults to make sense.
My proposal does not harm backwards compatibility in the slightest.
A system-wide config file in /etc that changes defaults for every program would break any program that assumes the old defaults.
It also wouldn't solve the problem of having to manually find out what the current recommended defaults are. With editions, you can simply enable the latest one and know you've got the right defaults.
I should have been more clear, I meant a sqlite.conf can configure a program rather than have it apply globally. For example, a config file placed in same directory as its .wal file to tune it for specific instances. That way you don’t need to lookup what “editions” apply which pragmas or settings. With sqlite.conf you can tune your specific database connections by uncommenting the default settings to enable current features/best practices
SQLite isn't typically a global one-per-system database, and even if it was how would that solve this problem? The problem isn't that you can't set all these settings to the right values - it's that they don't have the right values by default.
You know, 10 years ago one might have remarked ... changing these defaults means C programmers would have to correctly implement error handling and retries.
The reaction they're likely to have to that can probably be best described in megatons, like any other nuclear explosion ...
The "3" refers to the file format (or rather, represents a breaking file format change vs 2), which the devs have committed to keep backward-compatible until 2050. https://sqlite.org/lts.html
Oooh I'd forgotten about that! I'm keen on the real (non-rowid) primary keys and covering indexes. I'm not sure about defaulting to decimal math, but I suppose the reasoning makes sense
HN… for the love of god… please please stop trying to make SQLite be something it isn’t. Leave this poor project alone.
It’s a great tool if you want to give a local app its own database. If you need concurrent writes and full ACID guarantees of an industrial strength database, use an industrial strength database.
Yes, other databases will require you to read more manual pages and configure a service. Higher up front cost. Not “lightweight.” But given enough operating time there is a certain unarguable lightness to using the right tool for the job.
Just by its testing and its number of installations (real world testing) you could consider SQLite being more "industrial strength" than any other DB on the market.
Interesting idea - I like seeing a list of pet-peeves followed by a proposal for a straightforward way to have a set of 'alternative defaults' that remains backwards compatible. If you don't want to opt in, don't run the new PRAGMA edition = 2026.
Too often it's just a list of issues and a wish that everyone else will change.
In (mild) defense of SQLITE_BUSY - busy_timeout just tells sqlite to sleep and retry up to the timeout when it receives SQLITE_BUSY. It seems like a sensible default for a library to leave that up the calling code - which may have something else it could do while it waits. However, that logic often gets missed!
This isn't so much a list of pet peeves as it is the almost universal way people that work seriously with SQLite configure the database. It's reasonable to suggest that the alternative settings for each of these suggestions is probably the wrong default for 2026.
> It's reasonable to suggest that the alternative settings for each of these suggestions is probably the wrong default for 2026.
That's the key concept here. When tightening up the defaults, an "edition" mechanism is a good solution.
Now we need this for C/C++, which have much legacy stuff which ought to go away for new code. This is more feasible than it used to be, because "Convert this Edition 4 code to Edition 5" is something LLMs can do now.
I'd never seen all the rules for SQLite soft typing written out before. Those are more complicated than strong typing.
> Now we need this for C/C++
P1881 Epochs proposed to WG21 (the C++ standards committee) in 2019 by Vittorio Romeo
The committee found plenty of problems with this, and made it clear that if Vittorio did all the hard work to resolve those problems they would find more, P1881 was abandoned.
There was a Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1tja9zr/c_profiles_a_c... which suggested that the "Profiles" idea Bjarne is pushing for C++ 29 could be used to deliver this.
So, you're not the first person to notice that this is a good idea, P1881 was written after Rust's 2018 Edition, but before 2021 Edition with its even more significant improvements. I firmly believe Rust's Editions unlock not only technical possibilities (though it does certainly do that) it unlocks an appetite from users which is good for your ecosystem.
I’d say these are reasonable settings for most uses. Though do you know of surveys that back this up? I don’t mean to nit pick too much, I’d just like to see common uses and the data.
SQLite is used in a lot of unconventional settings (for SQL databases) where these settings don't make as much sense. But that's what makes the "edition" useful; it captures the use case we all mean when we're thinking of the "database" lego in an application stack.
While that's true, editions are more about leaving legacy decisions behind while keeping the backward compatibility promise.
Even if you're in one of those unconventional settings (say, a bare-metal microcontroller or something), you'd probably still start from edition 2026 and mutate your settings accordingly, rather than using the defaults that are 26 years old.
Yeah, that's important. Rust's 2015 edition is worse, not just different from what you'd write today with 2024 edition. There's a clear direction of travel.
Yes, agree. These are very sane defaults and match what I use..
You are probably correct, but I imagine the SQLite team's dedication to backwards compatibility has things the way they are so that existing systems can user later versions a swap without worrying about changing the SQL using it.
If they’re opt-in, how could the new defaults be a problem for backwards compatibility?
GPP's wording suggests that the defaults simply be changed to what is being discussed as more generally sensible in current times, rather than being opt-in.
Given how many projects are potentially out there effectively relying on the current settings, and SQLite's general attitude to backwards compatibility, that would likely not be considered a good idea. Opting in with an edition flag for new (or updating) projects does seem like a good solution to this to serve all of old, active, and new projects, but it would increase potential bug surface area and therefor testing requirements, and the existing setting do allow all that to be opted in/out to/from already (and it is only four settings we are talking about here).
That FKs being enforced is set per-connection rather than at the database level is something that surprised me a lot when I found out. A way of setting that at DB creation (or via ALTER DATABASE after) seems like quite an omission because if you have multiple potential routes that can update the same DB any one of them could cause serious the others will encounter.
The entire point of "SQLite should have editions" is so that projects can opt into a set of modern defaults for 2026 and not get all of those backwards compatible decisions from 20 years ago.
busy_timeout is often sidestepped (ignored) when a transaction attempts to upgrade from a read to a write producing SQLITE_BUSY.
By default, SQLite transactions start in DEFERRED mode, acting as read transactions until an actual write operation occurs.
If another connection begins writing to the database while your transaction is in this read state, an immediate SQLITE_BUSY error is triggered regardless of what you set busy_timeout to
Yep. The whole locking database thing is this persistent myth about SQLite. All databases lock on write, it’s a question of the granularity of the lock. Multiple writers simply take turns.
yes but no... most database allow for at least as many parallel and concurrent writes as there are tables at a minimum.
The "lock on write" problem is that in MySQL i could run a OLAP pipeline for a few hours and have a fully functioning database with degraded perfomance, on SQLite the same pipeline would lock the database for the full hour. (there are surely ways to solve this (eg using the main db as read-only and a secondary db for writes or splitting the writes in incremental transaction), but it is not a "myth".
The “myth” is you can’t use it for a website because if you have multiple requests that need to write they can’t do it concurrently. (They just take turns of course for the milliseconds of write time.)
If you run a transaction with writes for an hour on any database, the data you update will literally be locked. So your example only works if results are independent of the data other programs want to use.
Of course more granularity of locking is better and enables more designs that would not otherwise work. But somewhere you run into the same problem of writers taking turns.
They don’t know by now, honestly they don’t want to know.
After read, it hit me that because sqlite is a DB, "editions" as-is not work.
Because it not tied to the data but to the code.
Instead, what I think should be is that the PRAGMAs become "data" that is always checked in full with "if manually set" and then on next "open" THEY GET APPLIED.
That is.
(and in the command line when open interactively they show up).
RE: SQLITE_BUSY: I would replace "often" with "nearly always." On top of that, it's often not fixed even when pointed out. "This software only has one writer, so we don't need to handle SQLITE_BUSY" translates to me sending SIGSTOP to a process any time I want to run some queries against its database.
SQLite is slightly different from Rust in that it is a data container. It’s somewhat more common for people to move SQLite database files from one machine to another and then inspect using the command line tool. And it is often the case that the embedded SQLite version in your app is a newer version than whatever version /usr/bin/sqlite3 happens to be. Adding editions to your SQLite file will probably break this use case of using an older version to read a database written by a newer version because it does not know what has changed in a new edition.
Not a big deal though. Probably just need better ops to bundle the command-line utility that’s the same version as what’s used in your app.
For some of these pragmas you have the same issue with or without "editions", right? Busy timeout is per-connection. And then: if you're running in WAL mode, you, the user, have to know that, or risk messing up the database by copying just the .db file rather than vacuuming-into.
Editions make the problem worse by requiring the version not only to support the underlying pragmas but also to understand the edition mapping.
Example: PRAGMA foo=1 is introduced in 2027. PRAGMA edition=2030 implies this foo pragma. Now you unnecessarily lock out three years worth of releases.
There’s no need to store the literal edition in the DB file. Instead the edition could be a library construct that sets appropriate flags. So if you set edition 2026 you get WAL, etc.
I don't see how you don't have the pragma compatibility problem either way. The edition proposal captures a bunch of behaviors that already exist.
Yes, the problem exists either way. Editions just exacerbate the problem.
feature-set would be a better idea, because it is more explicit on what you are enabling
I think you can maintain full backward compatibility with all these changes. SQLite has a bunch of meta-data that you can use to see that no earlier editions have modified your database since you last wrote. You make the new editions follow these strict rules, but if an old edition modifies the DB in the interim, you fall back to the original rules, until it’s verified compliant again.
editions could be self-describing as to certain semantic changes, and you could embed that with the file. older versions could safely ignore it and newer versions parse and run it. you could also force things like "editions must be declared early", "editions are one way only" etc to get some level of security in the adoption of the change
It seems SQLite could be evolve to solve this by just bundling itself entirely in the data files? After all, the binary is less than 1MB, anywhere you’re putting a database surely has at least that much overhead, for most applications it’s less than a drop in the bucket.
I’d be interested to learn if there are any db implementations that take this approach, or reasons this wouldn’t work.
There is a way to do this with sqlite in readonly mode using the append vfs [0] which allows you to put your DB appended to the end of the executable, and then the executable can read it (like a zip file the header is then at the end of the db rather than the front). Or you could embed a normal db as a binary blob with the linker. Allowing writes is more tricky because most OSes don't typically allow executables to edit their own executable memory (on unix I believe executables always load as r/x or r/o depending on the region, maybe with some minor exceptions).
And a lot of users of sqlite statically link sqlite within their executable, they actually recommend that instead of dynamically linking.
[0] https://sqlite.org/vfs.html ctrl-f for 'append'
Edit: I got confused between the sqlar command and the append vfs so fixed it.
Well you'd have the problem that an sqlite database file created on a Linux AMD64 box could be copied to an AArch64 macOS machine to be read there. And quite a lot of (cross platform) software build their file formats on top of SQLite.
I think my silly and unserious naive response would be linear scaling bundled binaries with number of platforms doesn’t seem to be that materially different in terms of total size. But I see your point, didn’t consider the architectures
it would be sorta enough to bundle the wasm binary
That's the idea behind the future file format:
https://github.com/future-file-format/F3
Bundle a wasm decoder as a fallback when native decoder isn't available.
Perhaps it could be an "actually portable executable"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273960
So for every new SQLite db you want to access would have to run a new untrusted executable? That seems… hilariously bad for security.
Fair point! Was mostly an intrusive technical thought
I mean.... it does sound like a fun project
> SQLite is slightly different from Rust in that it is a data container.
I think this is the key.
From sqlite.org [1]:
> [Since 2004], the file format has been fully backwards compatible.
> By "backwards compatible" we mean that newer versions of SQLite can always read and write database files created by older versions of SQLite. It is often also the case that SQLite is "forwards compatible", that older versions of SQLite can read and write database files created by newer versions of SQLite. But there are sometimes forward compatibility breaks. Sometimes new features are added to the file format
---
Given editions (A) and (B), what does backwards compatibility look like? Must (B) be backwards compatible with (A)?
If yes -> editions are backwards compatible but not necessarily forwards compatible, which is the current status quo:
If no -> editions are not backwards compatible, the edition space is bifurcated: Now you may have to worry about backwards compatibility with (A)..(Z). What happens when you import a file from edition (Y)?1. https://www.sqlite.org/formatchng.html
---
Interesting PS, grepping sqlite.org for "backwards compat": https://pastebin.com/Q7b7h4eM
The answer to the question "What happens when you import a file from edition (Y)" should, ideally, be exactly the same as the answer to the question "What happens when you import a file created with parameters foo, bar and baz set to values a, b and c". There's really nothing new here.
Some parameters are properties of the database file itself, such as (I believe) journal_mode. These parameters probably result in issues with earlier versions of sqlite; if you create a file with journal_mode WAL, you're not gonna be able to open it in a version of sqlite without WAL support. Same with strict tables; if you have a database which contains strict tables, I assume you're going to encounter issues if you try to open it in a version of sqlite too old to support strict tables. But anything new enough to support the individual database file features shouldn't have any trouble. This is true whether we're talking about an edition pragma or individual parameters set the old way.
Some parameters are properties of the connection, like the foreign_keys parameter. If you're trying to open a database file in a version of sqlite which doesn't support foreign key validation at all, just don't set the foreign_keys parameter.
A lot of this discussion mirrors the SQLite forum's discussion on the never-implemented "PRAGMA strict":
https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/1b9d073a37ca5998
I personally find this idea interesting and would like if SQLite meaningfully moved away from Postel's Law.
> I don't think I need to explain why it's a bad idea for a database to be so careless about data validation.
Well, loose typing can be extremely useful, and having a type of "ANY" would not replace it.
I have built recently an accounting reconciliation system to find discrepancies in data coming from a large variety of sources: some from proper database engines (MySQL MariaDB), but most from proprietary systems that export to CSV. It's amazing how corrupt data can become: dates that are invalid, numbers that aren't numbers, strings strings strings everywhere.
Being able to store the data into tables that have types, but can accept anything, is simply great.
Your... solution to bad ETL data is to go "let's keep it this way"?
You can already "store whatever you want" in a serious database that respects types by default. It's called a blob or if you must, a text/varchar.
Are you saying that you have an application where you want the loose-typing-with-integer-affinity semantics for a column (or some other particular affinity)? It would be entirely reasonable to have a specific type for each loose-with-affinity variant. But I don’t think those should be the default.
> I don't think I need to explain why it's a bad idea for a database to be so careless about data validation.
...Meanwhile MongoDB being successful for years with no sign of decline.
> loose typing can be extremely useful
"Loose typing" enforced in a strict typing system can be useful in certain scenarios, but it is regrettable that it instead replaced the strict typing discipline for some time in software. Strict typing should be the default, because it is the most accurate description of data in the vast majority of cases.
The "use strict" thing is interesting. I often hear people say, well we can't fix absurd behavior in JS because backwards compatibility! Well, we already did, and we can do it again!
"use strict;" is a perl thing. You also may turn experimental features on, or demand feature set from a certain version.
Brilliant. I have a similar idea for a language I've been envisioning.
So, my approach to dynamic features, global mutable state, etc... There's this big list of features which have caused me tremendous pain over the years. I am increasingly weary.
Sometimes you want or need them, though. You don't want the same level of strictness for every project (e.g. throwaway scripts or game jams), nor at every stage of a project -- e.g. being forced to specify invariants is something I'd love to be able to enable, but I wouldn't want that on while I'm still figuring out the basic structure of things.
So for game jams I'd put the language into #JAMMODE (which would be short for a bunch of other flags). But the point here is that jam mode should be opt-in, rather than opt-out. You should have to go out of your way to enable the footguns. And a file with #JAMMODE should be a little smelly. You should think, OK I'm actually shipping this thing now, let's get it out of #JAMMODE. (And strict files can't talk to jam files, and we probably want different strictness levels beyond Debug and Release, etc... someone told me with the strictness "zones" that I'm reinventing half of Ada, hahah.)
It was (just a perl thing last millennium).. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
"use stricter"
"use strong" was a proposal from Google
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qk0qC4s_XNCLemj42FqfsRLp...
I became hopeful for a moment, then saw it's from 2015. Ouch! (Also, I love the name. I had a similar idea I called "use sane", but obviously that one wouldn't have gotten far...)
The strong typing thing is really interesting. After using JavaScript for a while, I developed PTSD around dynamic types. I became convinced that static typing was the only way to avoid hell.
Then I used Python for a while, and... experienced approximately none of my previous pain. I found that quite odd. Turns out what I was actually after was a sane type system, not a static one. In other words, strong types rather than weak ones.
I do think there are additional benefits to static typing, especially for larger projects and serious work. But I was surprised that most of the pain-delta was in this first jump:
Weak -> Strong -> Static
“hold my beverage”;
"use loose; footloose; kick off your Sunday shoes"
Oh I really like this! The one counterargument that comes to mind is when I think about the likes of C++, where there are many editions and they can be confusing to keep track of.
I'm not sure if you'd want to set one edition in stone every year. Perhaps every 3 years? Or 5 years? Especially for a long-term project like SQLite, that sounds perfectly acceptable!
Oh hi, author here. Fun to see this make it to HN.
Found what appears to be a minor mistake you may want to fix: "This means that a dangling reference easily results in a reference to the wrong column" should probably be "... a reference to the wrong row". (In the paragraph about SQLite's tendency to re-use ROWIDs).
You're right, thanks. Fixed
Suggestion: post this on https://sqlite.org/forum/forum - the SQLite team monitor that forum closely and I've had some really great answers from them to questions or suggestions in the past.
I haven't really ever participated in that forum before, but it's an interesting idea. I don't know if I'm going to do it, I might. Though I also wouldn't mind if someone else posted about it there. I might even make a forum account and participate in the discussion.
https://lobste.rs/c/kzln1c
In the first example, there's a a second thing that surprised me: you delete an entity and it's unique ID gets reused? Is that a good idea?
I guess if foreign keys are handled properly then that's not a problem by definition? But it sounds wrong somehow.
I think that's a security vulnerability.
If a parent table ID gets reused, then it's a potential to expose data to a wrong user -- security broked.
That's correct but SQLite was never designed to be a production database in the first place. It can be used as a production database but only if you know what you're doing, and presumably anyone who knows what they're doing knows about the AUTOINCREMENT keyword because it's one of the first things you learn about SQLite.
>> you delete an entity and it's unique ID gets reused? Is that a good idea?
That's default behavior, but it can be altered when creating a table. See;
https://sqlite.org/autoinc.html
Where do you see that they get reused from that link?
> The normal ROWID selection algorithm described above will generate monotonically increasing unique ROWIDs as long as you never use the maximum ROWID value and you never delete the entry in the table with the largest ROWID. If you ever delete rows or if you ever create a row with the maximum possible ROWID, then ROWIDs from previously deleted rows might be reused when creating new rows and newly created ROWIDs might not be in strictly ascending order.
What should it do once you hit MAXINT? Honest question…
I don’t think people are criticizing the MAXINT thing. The problem is that IDs are already reused when you create 10 rows, delete 5 and then make a new one. Normal DB engines just keep counting afaik so the new ID will still be one that has never been used before.
This changes one default that "everyone agrees about" and which you can change with a compile time option: SQLITE_DEFAULT_FOREIGN_KEYS
Then it argues for STRICT tables, recognizing that there are drawbacks without introducing a new feature (custom type aliases, CREATE TYPE alias = base).
If also doesn't even considering what it means for existing data to make tables strict, which is precisely why “there is no pragma to globally make all tables strict”.
Then it argues for setting a busy timeout, and picks 5s. Why? Why 5s and not 1 or 60s? SQLite doesn't decide, which makes perfect sense. Your OS or programming language also doesn't offer you locks with a default timeout: it's either indefinite, or an instant "try lock".
Finally: WAL mode is a different file format, unsupported on many platforms, in more danger of silent corruption. Why should it be the default?
The section "The solution: editions?" in the article addresses directly the point of existing data.
The way I read it, this article does not advocate at any point to change the defaults for existing databases, but rather to start with better defaults for new databases.
Also, regarding the timeout of 5 seconds, I disagree with your premise "SQLite doesn't decide, which makes perfect sense". As the article explains, SQLite decides on the value zero (ie. instant error), which is arguably an inconvenient default.
An alternative is to use wrapper libraries that set sane defaults, e.g. https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/bestpractice.html
But I suppose it would be nice to have a standard way to refer to those defaults, in a cross-runtime way.
On iOS most apps link Apple's prebuilt libsqlite3, so compile-time defaults are out of reach.
It might be worth bringing this up on the forum [1]. The developers are quite active there, and it's possible they've never considered this option, or they have considered it and have reasons to not go for it. The original design followed Postel's Law (see my comment from the other say [2]), it would (theoretically) be nice if that mess could be avoided by specifying an edition.
Today I noticed I could do `pragma foreign_key = ON`, and despite the pragma being wrong (it should be foreign_keys, plural), it reported nothing. In fact, it reports nothing with the correct pragma either. So check your pragmas!
1. https://sqlite.org/forum/forum
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900625
The Postfix mailer has allowed recommended default behavior to evolve using its "compatibility_level" parameter:
https://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#compatibility_level
https://www.postfix.org/COMPATIBILITY_README.html
You get a warning whenever you depend on the deprecated old default until you either move forward or specifically commit to the old behavior.
I think CMake actually has the best default evolution system out there (a bit surprising give how awful the actual language is).
Each "policy" they change can be manually set to old or new, and there's a global config to set them all at once based on the version of CMake.
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/cmake_minimum_re...
I scarcely go a week without encountering issues caused by their huge CMake 4 backward compatibility break. I think CMake has one of the worst solutions out there.
Sadly, the ORM layer lags here: Drizzle has no way to declare STRICT tables. The request has been open since March 2023 (issue #202, now discussion #2435) and didn't make the v1.0 beta either. The only workaround is hand-appending STRICT to generated migration SQL, which doesn't work at all if you use `drizzle-kit push`.
https://github.com/drizzle-team/drizzle-orm/discussions/2435
been working on a new implementation entirely of a local sqlite like database. It's from scratch in rust and data is made up of TSV's so the data is human (and agent) readable. sql querying is more expensive for an llm
SQLite gets so much praise here but when you start using it, you realize quickly how bad it is, the type system is by default very limited and dangerous.
It's like comparing old php with a strongly typed language.
There is not even a date type...
SQLite competes with fopen. Not Postgres
It’s curious how many people don’t understand what SQLite is and its intended feature set. They get huffy that it’s not a full client server model with multimaster clustering across 8 data centers on 12 continents plus New Zealand with realtime synchronous replication.
It’s a product that allows you to do sql like things without a database server. If you need to have database server behavior, you’re using the wrong product.
Well, it goes both ways. You'll see articles saying essentially "you don't need Postgres or any other fancy database, SQlite is enough" while ignoring the fact that some use-cases warrant a more conventional DB server.
Different tools for different situations!
I agree with you. There are 2 dozen foot-guns to be kept in mind. And discovered a new footgun regarding multi-byte strings and NUL handling today on HN. SQLite became popular because it was the only free and open-source choice 2 decades ago. Now there are other type-safe and robust choices.
It is very simple. Which means fast to setup in dev environment for local testing. Which makes first version very easy. And then people just keep fixing that one.
Still I quite a lot of question the use on servers if you have decided that I need a database.
Not that there isn't more valid use cases like local storage or self-contained information transfer for specific use.
What are other choices for FOSS serverless relational databases? I’ve been looking everywhere and couldn’t find anything.
Firebird can be embedded, although neither the database itself, nor the embedded mode are as popular as they once were.
It's a fully featured database though, with everything you expect from one, including actually working ALTER TABLEs.
DuckDB ? Strict by default and excellent for logs, telemetry, dashboard apps, etc.
From what I can tell, DuckDB is more focused on huge-scale data analysis than simple data persistence, so I’m not sure if it fits my use cases. Otherwise, it looks good.
It’s not as bad since you can always use a powerful programming language with a good type system that avoids type errors at the SQL level. You can build good abstractions in your programming language.
Nah, all those defaults are features. Of course, there are contexts where those defaults are unsuitable which means: Use a Different RDBMS!
Change RDBMS instead of changing configs from their default value? They're configurable for a reason.
Are there any other serverless SQL DBMSes?
Lots. Firebird and DuckDB come immediately to mind. Wikipedia lists several more, though not all of them are relational: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_database
I think the solution is for author to use PostgreSQL
Those choices were made for specific reasons that make sense in embedded environment and when backward compatibility is no.1 concern.
But I wouldn't mind feature-sets. Editions are too wide of a concept and tell you nothing at glance what a given code is doing, "enable 2026 set of features" tells me nothing on what is actually enabled.
What are the specific reasons for why it makes sense in embedded systems to not enforce foreign key constraints or to let me insert a blob into an integer column? Because I work with embedded systems and have never found those defaults to make sense.
My proposal does not harm backwards compatibility in the slightest.
Why not a .conf file like everything in /etc or postgresql.conf?
These proposed editions are per connection.
A system-wide config file in /etc that changes defaults for every program would break any program that assumes the old defaults.
It also wouldn't solve the problem of having to manually find out what the current recommended defaults are. With editions, you can simply enable the latest one and know you've got the right defaults.
I should have been more clear, I meant a sqlite.conf can configure a program rather than have it apply globally. For example, a config file placed in same directory as its .wal file to tune it for specific instances. That way you don’t need to lookup what “editions” apply which pragmas or settings. With sqlite.conf you can tune your specific database connections by uncommenting the default settings to enable current features/best practices
SQLite isn't typically a global one-per-system database, and even if it was how would that solve this problem? The problem isn't that you can't set all these settings to the right values - it's that they don't have the right values by default.
you can also set those defaults with compile time flags, that's what I have been doing.
You know, 10 years ago one might have remarked ... changing these defaults means C programmers would have to correctly implement error handling and retries.
The reaction they're likely to have to that can probably be best described in megatons, like any other nuclear explosion ...
It is sqlite3. Emphasis on the 3 - it already has 'editions'.
The "3" refers to the file format (or rather, represents a breaking file format change vs 2), which the devs have committed to keep backward-compatible until 2050. https://sqlite.org/lts.html
It also refers to what the binary on my PATH is called, also what the library name I need to pass to link against it.
They even had an sqlite4:
https://sqlite.org/src4/doc/trunk/www/design.wiki
Oooh I'd forgotten about that! I'm keen on the real (non-rowid) primary keys and covering indexes. I'm not sure about defaulting to decimal math, but I suppose the reasoning makes sense
HN… for the love of god… please please stop trying to make SQLite be something it isn’t. Leave this poor project alone.
It’s a great tool if you want to give a local app its own database. If you need concurrent writes and full ACID guarantees of an industrial strength database, use an industrial strength database.
Yes, other databases will require you to read more manual pages and configure a service. Higher up front cost. Not “lightweight.” But given enough operating time there is a certain unarguable lightness to using the right tool for the job.
Just by its testing and its number of installations (real world testing) you could consider SQLite being more "industrial strength" than any other DB on the market.
- https://sqlite.org/testing.html
- https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
EDIT: added links
Exactly. There is no reason to complain about it. It is successful. People who find it lacking can use something else, there are many options.
I don’t understand why a local app database shouldn’t still have the same basic functionality and data guarantees as the full-sized ones.
You can just run postgresql locally like akonadi does if that's what you need