SQLite in development, PostgreSQL in production—why not?

Question

Heroku advises against this because of possible issues. I\'m an SQL noob, can you explain the type of issues that could be encountered by using different databases?

Answer 1

I was in a (kind of) similar situation. Generally it is a very bad idea to use different database engines for production and test. There are multiple reasons

• SQL syntax differences including DML, DDL statements, stored procedures, triggers etc
• Performance optimizations done on one DB wont be valid on the other
• SQLite is an embedded database, PostgreSQL is not
• They don't support the same data types
• Different syntax/commands to configure/setup db. SQLite uses PRAGMAs

One should stick to one db engine, unless you have a really, really good reason. I can't think of any.