[Zope-dev] SQLite as a Light DB component for Zope and Python

[Ross J. Reedstrom]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 10:02:22AM -0500, Eron Lloyd wrote:
> Very interesting. I think I've read about this somewhere before. The
> claim of "4x faster than PostgreSQL" raised my brow. It is true that
> Gadfly is becoming quite stale, and only supports a *very* limited
> subset of SQL. It also would be nice to see something a bit more robust
> than just shelve in the Standard Library. Gadfly is ok to begin a
> prototype in, but frustrating once you quickly hit a glass ceiling in
> functionality. I'm interested in seeing how well it can scale, versus
> Postgres, however. Any experience?

Scale, as in multiuser? Hardly at all: it's an SQL library that accesses
a single, textbased, flatfile for the entire database. From the FAQ,
multiple readers are allowed (on Unix), but the entire file (yes,
that's the whole database, not a single table) is locked for one backend
to write.

As a lightweight replacement for gadfly, it looks like it might be pretty
good. Note that the scripting language of choice of the author seems
to be Tcl, rather than Python. This probably explains the 'everything
is a string' approach :-) The speed comparisions with PostgreSQL are
very much an apples vs. fish sort of thing: the pgsql server was not
tuned _at all_, and does a whole lot more that was never tested, such
as multi-user writer access.

Ross