Jellyfin is a self-hostable media server. If they "used Postgres", that means anyone who runs it needs Postgres. I think SQLite is the better choice for this kind of application, if one is going to choose a single database instead of some pluggable layer

Jellyfin is mostly for a single household, right? Sqlite should be much more than sufficient for Jellyfin (if used correctly). Unfortunately, reading this article you get the impression that they are not using it optimally

I run Jellyfin in a multi-arch cluster because I hate myself, and this would force me to think about where Jellyfin/Postgres is deployed because Postgres databases aren't portable.

I already had to do that for my authoritative PG deployment, and my media manager shouldn't require a full RDBMS.

Using SQLite for Jellyfin has made running it wherever really, really easy, same thing with doing backups and lazy black box debugging.

Their whole recent rewrite of the DB code (to Entity Framework) is to allow the user choice of DB in future.

Using postgres would make it significantly more complicated for Jellyfin users to install and set up Jellyfin. And then users would need to worry about migrating the databases when PostgreSQL has a major version upgrade. An embedded database like sqlite is a much better fit for something like Jellyfin.

Even with postgres, you don't have to use the system instance; there's nothing stopping you from running the server as a child process.

You probably need to support this for your testsuite anyway.

Sqlite is fine you need to read the extensive documentation though to get the most out of it. It also has terrible defaults.

I think the author od this article missed sqlite_busy.

Once you do have it set up correctly, are handling a single writer at the application level and have litestream set up your off to the races assuming your app can scale on a single box (it most likely can).

Sqlite has so many small benefits for tiny projects it can't be easily replaced.

It's like saying "oh, you want to visit Austrian country side next month and you're asking for advice for best tent? How about you build a cabin instead?".

Jellyfin is a media server app that gets installed on a great variety of platforms and while it would certainly be possible to add a postgres server to the install, the choice of sqlite is more than justified here IMHO.

100%. I specifically clicked for the “why you should care” and was disappointed I could not find it.

I certainly don’t mind if someone is pushing the limits of what SQLite is designed for but personally I’d just rather invest the (rather small) overhead of setting up a db server if I need a lot of concurrency.

As a user of Jellyfin, I’m very sad that it doesn’t just use Postgres. I basically have to run an NFS system just for Jellyfin so that its data can be available to it no matter which node it gets scheduled on and also that there are never multiple instances running at the same time, even during deployments (e.g., I need to take care that deployments completely stop the first Jellyfin instance before starting the subsequent instance). There are so many unnecessary single points of failure, and Postgres would make a pretty big one go away (never mind addressing the parallelism problems that plague the developers).

Jellyfin is by far the least reliable application I run, but it also seems to be best in class.