Size isn't everything for the modest creator of SQLite (2007)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jun/21/it.guardianweeklytechnologysection

by mbgaxyz • 10 years ago

92 26 10 years ago

dalke3• 10 years ago

A nice interview, though from 2007. One thing has changed a smidgeon: "he has a self-imposed limit on the size of his product: 250KB. And he's stuck to both aims". The FAQ on sqlite.org says "With all features enabled, the library size can be less than 500KiB ... If optional features are omitted, the size of the SQLite library can be reduced below 300KiB." Close though!

nly• 10 years ago

Also out of date. The 3.10.2 shared library is over 1 MiB on my system.

dalke3• 10 years ago

Compiling with -Os brings it down to 800 KB.

  % gcc -c sqlite3.c
  % ls -l sqlite3.o
  -rw-r--r--  1 dalke  admin  1270372 Feb  6 04:11 sqlite3.o
  % gcc -c sqlite3.c -Os
  % ls -l sqlite3.o
  -rw-r--r--  1 dalke  admin  805044 Feb  6 04:12 sqlite3.o

  % clang -c sqlite3.c
  % ls -l sqlite3.o
  -rw-r--r--  1 dalke  admin  1248704 Feb  6 04:15 sqlite3.o
  % clang -c -Os sqlite3.c
  % ls -l sqlite3.o
  -rw-r--r--  1 dalke  admin  796888 Feb  6 04:16 sqlite3.o

778 KiB is still some 50% larger than 500.

coliveira• 10 years ago

This might have to do with 64 bit platforms. I would test this on a 32 bit binary.

dang2• 10 years ago

We should have a bonus for finding great old articles that never were posted to HN before.

There was another one earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11048637.

bootload• 10 years ago

yeah I'll take a look, @dang the web rusts a lot so a lot of old stuff might be archived [0] there.

[0] Internet Archive https://archive.org/

greglindahl• 10 years ago

For the future, HN's software could call the Wayback Machine's "save page now" API on all front-page links.

sehugg• 10 years ago

So how many SQLite databases are in use? "We don't have a good way of counting it," he says, "but we're guessing it's the most widely deployed SQL database in the world."

This article came out before the original iPhone was released -- it certainly is by now, probably by an order of magnitude.

skeeterbug• 10 years ago

Chrome uses it for local storage too right?

infogulch• 10 years ago

And Firefox. There are probably more instances of SQLite in use than humans on the planet.

abtinf• 10 years ago

Just "an order of magnitude"? I suspect you are off by an order of magnitude. If you count each deployed instance of each product using it, it's probably the most popular by close to 10 orders of magnitude.

Edit: phones are just the start. Numerous embedded products use it - the kind that ship in such large quantities that a couple pennies per device become significant sums of money. And even in the phone case, every app is using a separate database.

adrianN• 10 years ago

10 orders of magnitude is a lot. Are you really saying there are ten billion times more SQLlite databases than the next most popular SQL?

ksec• 10 years ago

what happened to SQLite 4?

maaku• 10 years ago

This is from 2007.

smadge• 10 years ago

Hacker news is too often obsessed with get rich quick schemes, and devising new ways to rip people off. It's nice to hear a story about people who just wants to write good, useful software, and release it to the public domain.

matt_wulfeck• 10 years ago

The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of a legal notice, here is a blessing: may you do good and not evil. May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

Wow! That is the most enlightened disclaimer I've ever read.

Size isn't everything for the modest creator of SQLite (2007)

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