Sharing an SQLite database across containers is surprisingly brilliant

https://medium.com/@rbranson/sharing-sqlite-databases-across-containers-is-surprisingly-brilliant-bacb8d753054

by vinnyglennon • 7 years ago

28 10 7 years ago

pcdoodle• 7 years ago

I agree with the article, I have a multiprocess app that works great this way under Windows and Linux. It's nice having less moving parts for my application.

teh_klev3• 7 years ago

Just a wee grammatical nitpick about the article title if the original author is reading:

Sharing an SQLite database -> Sharing a SQLite database

_l4lu• 7 years ago

Depends on whether you pronounce it see-kew-lite or ess-kew-lite :)

teh_klev3• 7 years ago

I think when you write "SQL", regardless of pronunciation, it should be "a".

sneak• 7 years ago

I was always under the impression that pronouncing “SQL” as “sequel” was a marketing meme started by Microsoft for their proprietary software.

whack• 7 years ago

Can someone explain the technical details around this? Specifically:

1) How are writes/updates propagated to all other containers/hosts? Is this based on the assumption that the containers will only read from the database, and not write to it? And that any writes being made externally, only need to be deployed to new containers, and it is fine for existing containers to read stale values?

2) Is there anything special about SQLite that enables this design? Or would someone else be able to do the same thing with a config.json file that is then read and parsed by each instance of the application?

3) I'm presuming that latency is vastly improved because real-time network requests are avoided. Can the exact same result be achieved by eagerly prefetching the config data at startup? Deploying a complete copy of the SQLite database to all containers, is in essence doing the same thing.

4) How does this solve the problem of "major incidents were happening all the time"? Is reading from a RDS (or similar) database really that fragile?

abetlen• 7 years ago

Late reply but you might find it useful to check out this post which is much more detailed https://segment.com/blog/separating-our-data-and-control-pla...

I'm also left with some questions however. If the issue is the high read latency with a centralised settings database, why not deploy read replicas?

Sharing an SQLite database across containers is surprisingly brilliant

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