using SQLite in Django in production?

Question

Sorry for this question, I dont know if i\'ve understood the concept, but SQLite is Serverless, this means the database in in a local machine, and it\'s stored in one file,

Answer 1

SQLite is not like BaseHTTPServer or anything basic like that. It's a fully featured embedded database. Quite fast too. Its SQL language might not have the most bells and whistles, but it's flexible enough. I haven't run into cases where I needed something it cannot do for the projects I was involved in (which aren't your typical web apps, truth be told).

Anyone that claims SQLite is good or bad for production without discussing the actual design is not telling you much. SQLite is pretty fast. In some cases, literally orders of magnitude faster than, say, Postgres, which comes up as a go-to alternative among Djangonauts. As someone pointed out, it also supports lots of concurrency. It's a matter of whether your app falls under the 'some cases' or not.

Now, there is one significant factor that has to be taken into account. SQLite is an in-process database. This is really important. If you are using something like gevent, you may run into edge cases where your app breaks. E.g., trying to do a transaction where you have a context switch in middle of it can possibly break the transaction in horrible ways. In other words, 'concurrency' really depends on your app, because SQLite is part of your app.

What you can't do with SQLite, though, in terms of scaling, is you can't make clusters of SQLite servers like you can with some of the other database engines, because it's in-process. Your app may or may not need to go to such lengths in terms of scaling, but my guess is that vast majority of apps out there don't anyway (wild guess).

On the other hand, being in-process means adding custom functions and aggregates to it is pretty trivial. I'm not sure if Django's ORM makes that any more difficult than it has to be, but you can come up with pretty good designs taking advantage of those features.