The SQLite Renaissance: Why the World's Most Deployed Database Is ...

### The Classic Limitations **1. Single-writer concurrency.** SQLite uses a file-level lock. One writer at a time. In WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) mode, you get concurrent reads with a single writer, but that's it. If your app needs high write throughput from multiple connections, traditional SQLite chokes. **2. No built-in replication.** PostgreSQL has streaming replication. MySQL has binlog replication. SQLite has... copying the file. For any application that needs high availability, failover, or geographic distribution, SQLite was a non-starter. **3. Single-machine storage.** The database is a file on disk. No clustering, no sharding, no distributed storage. Your data lives and dies with that one machine. **4. No network access.** Unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL, which run as network services that accept connections from anywhere, SQLite is an embedded library. Your application talks to it directly — which means no shared access from multiple services. … ### Don't Use SQLite When: **1. You need high sustained write throughput from many sources.** If your app genuinely needs thousands of concurrent write transactions per second from different processes, use PostgreSQL or MySQL. Financial trading platforms, real-time analytics ingest, and IoT sensor data pipelines are examples. **2. You need complex multi-table transactions with strict SERIALIZABLE isolation across distributed systems.** SQLite doesn't have the distributed transaction capabilities of PostgreSQL or CockroachDB. **3. You need row-level security or advanced access control.** PostgreSQL's Row-Level Security (RLS) is battle-tested for multi-tenant scenarios where you want fine-grained access control within a single database. SQLite doesn't have this. **4. Your team already has strong PostgreSQL/MySQL expertise and infrastructure.** Don't switch to SQLite just because it's trendy. If your existing stack works well, the migration cost probably isn't worth it.