The most widely used database in the world
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?
- MySQL
- Oracle
- MongoDB
- Microsoft Access
- 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…
