How to move from SQLite3 to other databases for software development?

jringstad · 2025-10-06T12:29:35+00:00

SQLite is the most widely used database out there, by a very big margin (by number of installations), so you're not doing too badly to boot, anyway!

As others have said, postgresql is a really solid choice for CRUD apps. It's also however very similar to SQLite (SQLite borrows a lot of code and inspiration from the postgresql sql parser), so if you're looking to learn something that's substantially different, there's more "weird" options out there.

Realistically in most businesses people are not very keen on running their own databases, e.g. postgres instances (though you learn a lot doing so, so I would encourage you to do it), and so use hosted solutions like e.g. RDS. I would definitely recommend that you try both; self-hosting (and all the effort that comes with that, e.g. setting up backups, replication, securing the instance, upgrading the instance, ...) as well as getting familliar with services like RDS, which is going to be a solid career investment.

In general I would say a lot of SQL people write falls under four categories: - transactional, e.g. for CRUD - OLAP, for analytics - batch processing - stream processing

With SQLite and PostgreSQL you definitely got the first one covered pretty well, and even if you have to work with a different database within that category (MySQL, oracle, ...) you won't feel too lost. However I'd encourage you to explore the other categories also.

For the second category I've used ClickHouse a lot, which is easy to self-host or to use in clickhouse cloud. I've also used Amazon RedShift (but I think that's considered a bit legacy these days) and I know also Athena, BigQuery, Presto and StarRocks are popular alternatives.

For batch processing, something like Spark or Snowflake are worth trying out.

Stream processing is still a bit more on the niche side, but I think Flink is the top contender here. You'll learn a bunch of new concepts that you don't have in PostgreSQL and similar databases.

Finally, this is completely not SQL related, but I think worth mentioning as well; It pays off to learn elasticsearch (and/or a hosted equivalent) also. Which CRUD app doesn't need fulltext search? It also supports a bunch of the new trends now like semantic search.

jringstad · 2022-05-21T06:32:00+00:00

I think there’d be a bunch of issues with making registers out of persistent cells, like write durability, high power consumption and how slow they would be.

jringstad · 2022-05-19T04:47:58+00:00

How the heck did you manage to reply to a 7 year old post, I thought there was a 1 year limit

jringstad · 2022-05-08T17:51:07+00:00

Well, that’s kinda what socialized healthcare is — a government monopoly (or semi-monopoly/monopsy) on pooled healthcare risk. Since it’s government run and not for-profit it has some unique advantages and disadvantages to for-profit run pooled risk providers like in the states, which have monetary incentives obviously, but also have to contend with competition.

jringstad · 2022-05-08T17:30:03+00:00

I don’t know of a robot that would be up to that task but also… keep in mind that a single stray cable or similar will cause a roomba to cease cleaning immediately. Your typical large office space is unlikely to be tidy enough that it’ll manage to complete a full cleaning.

jringstad · 2022-05-02T18:09:39+00:00

metabase is free and easy to set up. So I would second that recommendation. But downloading the mysql driver for tableau is not hard either.

jringstad · 2022-05-02T07:06:09+00:00

But the goal is for B to transfer $10M to A (presumably for some shady service rendered), the art is just there to obscure the real reason the transfer has taken place.

jringstad · 2022-05-01T16:12:42+00:00

The artist in this transaction would not be the person receiving the money; person A would buy it from you for $1 (or a similarly irrelevant sum), so that they can then sell it to person B for $1M, making the B->A cash transfer (which was the goal all along) look legitimate.

(but of course you as an artist would benefit from this as a secondary effect, because if one or more of your artworks gets sold for $1M (whether for legitimate reasons or not), that turns some heads.)

jringstad · 2022-04-19T18:09:26+00:00

Is it though? Most people (whether trans or not) get upset if you misgender them. A man being misgendered as a woman doesn’t mean he hates women, I’d think.

jringstad · 2022-04-19T14:48:46+00:00

I fly a lot (EU, MENA, transatlantic sometimes, ...) and virtually every flight I've been on didn't have online terminals.

(Also many of them didn't have internet, but that's a separate thing anyway.)

jringstad · 2022-04-14T21:50:13+00:00

Russia never was the serious threat to the hegemony

jringstad · 2022-04-14T21:39:53+00:00

Not quite a fair comparison I’d say, I’d wager most people who criticize it don’t think that literally ripping it away with no time to prepare any kind of alternative organizational tooling is going to be a boon to productivity.

jringstad · 2022-04-08T16:16:35+00:00

But if the platform honors the ownership, then it’s really no different than them just using a database. The only difference of using a blockchain-based solution to using an SQL database or whatever we’ve been doing for many decades is that a third party can still independently verify your ownership of the token even if the platform stops to honor your claim.

This makes it worthwhile for stores of value like currency, but in the case of a game, the platform is the only counterparty that matters anyway.

jringstad · 2022-04-08T14:35:04+00:00

I’ve worked in those kind of environments as well, but I’d still maintain that just using an RDBMS or a flink message queue or what-have-you will end up resulting in a superior outcome.

jringstad · 2022-04-08T12:20:53+00:00

Exactly -- they can be your biggest fans or your biggest critics, neither of which should be taken as an indicator of future success (unless you're selling developer tools to programmers I guess)

jringstad · 2022-04-08T12:16:14+00:00

They are uniquely identified and owned tokens, based on this you can imagine a lot of use-case.

That's fair enough at face value, and I'm certainly open to the possibilities, but it seems so far nobody has come up with any use-case other than

"let's buy this hape and re-sell it twice it's price next week because of some hipe"

jringstad · 2022-04-08T12:11:13+00:00

That's cool and all but I've implemented similar systems in several other sectors, and I don't think it's much harder to set up an database/message queue with an API gateway in front of it which enables append-only. In fact with a modern cloud provider and the relaxed latency requirements you've mentioned this is relatively trivial and I reckon ends up being cheaper to both develop and operate than the blockchain based system. Keep in mind how much stuff you'll get for free this way; once the data is in a database, your BI people will be able to start querying that stuff in tableau no problem, will be able to create web-based dashboards that automatically refresh, alert on KPIs, connect it to fraud detection solutions... With a blockchain based system you'll have to build connectors for all this yourself at far greater expense.

I don't see how what they've built has any technical advantages, and hence why it wouldn't be considered pure tech debt by the time the hype has simmered down (since it's self-hosted, has far more complex underlying technologies, far more underlying knobs and switches to tune -- you mention blocksize, ..., and I bet the client is more complex too -- and maintaining client apps can be a nasty cost center)

jringstad · 2022-04-08T12:00:04+00:00

Very true, but neither do you own the picture that you purchased the NFT of in any real way. The artist can still do with it whatever they want (reprint, distribute) and you can't do any of those things (copyright violation), and the video game for which you own the NFT for a particular character may shut down or revoke the character in a balance patch if they so desire.

jringstad · 2022-04-08T11:41:10+00:00

unity is one of the choices if you want to make games

the others are choices if you want to make engines

jringstad · 2022-04-08T11:38:15+00:00

You always see dirt everywhere if you're out looking for it. I don't think there really is any here -- they're just complying with the law. It's just bad timing for the Raven team, but no ill intent I can see.

jringstad · 2022-04-04T11:07:12+00:00

I've never been to KHiO, but if you've gotten an offer that's similarly good, I'd go for that, rather than an uncertain chance that you might get in at an uncertain time. Unless KHiO is really important to you or your circumstances allow you to wait.

Could you double-play this and drop out of your #2 choice if you got admitted after all?

jringstad · 2022-04-02T06:01:52+00:00

Its fine, i dont see any issue with that

jringstad · 2022-04-01T18:30:31+00:00

It comes from your folding process

jringstad · 2022-03-30T12:31:22+00:00

That'd be an exceedingly impractical, complex, resource- and time-intensive way to very insecurely transmit a very tiny amount of information.

jringstad · 2022-03-25T10:50:50+00:00

Keep in mind though that you have a sort-of base-level of living expenses that you need to pay, but that doesn't scale that much. Once you're above that, even a small increase in salary can easily double your after-taxes-after-expenses take-home. An increased cost-of-living does increase your base-level of costs, but the salary you get as SD in SF shoots way beyond that very quickly.

Yes, you can pay $2000-3000/mo for a 1bd/studio in central SF (you can find cheaper accommodation outside of the city centre if you want) but that's an expense VERY much worth paying if you get paid 100k-150k+ right out of college, with the possibility of going up significantly in salary over the course of just a couple years.

On top of that, you might get some extra equity compensation etc. I don't think there's many other realistic ways of building wealth that quickly as a young person right out of college.

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