The most widely used database in the world

Tom Deneire
5 min readNov 16, 2021
Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

A piece of trivia

It would be an excellent question for a trivia show for programmers (by the way, I would definitely watch that!):

What is the world’s most widely used database?

  1. MySQL
  2. Oracle
  3. MongoDB
  4. Microsoft Access
  5. Something else

The answer is, of course, “something else”, namely SQLite. According to their homepage, there are over 1 trillion (1e12) SQLite databases in active use!

What is SQLite?

SQLite is a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. Let’s go over these characteristics one by one.

SQLite is stand-alone or self-contained in the sense that it has very few dependencies. It runs on any operating system and the entire SQLite library is encapsulated in a single source code file that requires no special facilities or tools to build. Similarly, a complete SQLite database is nothing more than a single file.

SQLite is serverless, because unlike most SQL database engines it is not implemented as a client-server process. With SQLite, the process that wants to access the database reads and writes directly from the database files…

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