Ok I’ve been mentally blue-printing a new application in my head to do various tasks but thats not important, however I want this scalable application to be able to allow the end user to be able to connect to different ‘selectable’ databases such as a training database, UAT and production.
Instead of having a seperate MySQL database to handle all the seperate MySQL database connection details etc. I decided that I would try something I haven’t really dabbled with before (as I haven’t really had a need too!) so I thought I’d use SQLite to manage a small database of two tables (Remote MySQL connection details and a log table)…
So, I started looking around the internet at how it generally works, some database design tools and some interesting facts eg. who uses it, how its used and the like… and was very impressed, I thought I’d share some of my findings with you…
So what is it then?
SQLite is a in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. The code for SQLite is in the public domain and is thus free for use for any purpose, commercial or private. SQLite is currently found in more applications than we can count, including several high-profile projects.
SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file. The database file format is cross-platform – you can freely copy a database between 32-bit and 64-bit systems or between big-endian and little-endian architectures. These features make SQLite a popular choice as an Application File Format. Think of SQLite not as a replacement for Oracle but as a replacement for fopen()
For more infomation see:- http://www.sqlite.org/about.html
Well known users of SQLite:-
Adobe (AIR, Photoshop Lightbox and Adobe Reader), Apple Inc. (Apple Mail, Safari, iPhone, iTunes and iPod Touch), Dropbox, Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird) and Google (embedded in Android, Google Gears, Desktop for Mac and Google Crome)… For full details see:- http://www.sqlite.org/famous.html
There are several graphical clients to enable you to easily create and manage SQLite databases, I downloaded and played with this one earlier (which is devloped using QT and therefore works in Windows, Linux and MacOSX):- http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/
More Graphical clients however can be found here:- http://en.kioskea.net/faq/629-graphical-interfaces-for-sqlite
All in all this does look very impressive and I can’t wait to start playing with this and make PHP talk to my SQLite database…. I love the way that you only have a single file to copy-backup 🙂