alt Hacker NewsThe "SQLite doesn't scale" argument is usually just premature optimization masquerading as architectural wisdom.
Unless you are actively hitting WAL contention limits (which is surprisingly hard to do on modern NVMe), the operational simplicity of a single binary beats the "scalability" of a distributed mess any day.
We’ve normalized a complexity tax where every side project "needs" a dedicated DB cluster and a Redis cache. Pocketbase proves that for 99% of CRUD apps, the bottleneck isn't the database—it's the network latency and the developer's time spent managing k8s manifests.
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Personally the lack of a decimal type make SQLite a no-go for me. Its too much of a hassle to do financial operations completely on the application side.
I have a personal blog set up on the cheapest digital ocean droplet and i went ahead with sqlite for it, there is not much traffic on it and i think something like sqlite is actually the best choice for such projects. I did some benchmarking with a rust cli tool, the name i don't recall right now, something like apache bench but simpler. I wouldn't have the same performance if i had mysql or postgres running on the same machine.
The bottleneck of most applications is acquiring enough users to hit a technical bottleneck.