SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
canopic jug writes:
Distributed computing researcher, Murat Demirbas, has written a blog post about what he sees as the past, present, and future of SQLite.
This paper, which appeared in VLDB'22 a couple weeks ago, delves into analytical data processing on SQLite, identifying key bottlenecks and implementing suitable solutions. As a result of the optimizations implemented, SQLite is now up to 4.2X faster on the Star Schema Benchmark (SSB). This is a sweet little paper (befitting SQLite's fame). It is technically easy to read yet very fulfilling.
The paper also has an important theme. Throughout the paper, we see time and again how SQLite benefits from its informative profiling utilities and aggressive testing to identify and implement optimizations quickly. Performance and correctness monitoring is a prime factor in development velocity. The ease of profiling SQLite's execution engine enabled the team to pinpoint which virtual instructions were responsible for the bottlenecks, and also to watchout for performance regression issues. Their extensive test suite (consisting of fuzz, boundary value, regression, I/O, out-of mem testing) allowed them to quickly integrate the optimizations into a release build without worrying of breaking other components of the library.
SQLite is a widely used, single-node, online transaction processing (OLTP) database useful in many situations where SQL is relevant yet Postgresql or MariaDB are too heavy.
Previously:
(2019) SELECT Code_execution FROM * USING SQLite: Eggheads Lift the Lid on DB Security Hi-jinks
(2019) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Impacts SQLite
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