Use SQLite for a small or embedded database

Cost

Open source. Public domain, free to copy and ship inside any app.

How to do it

SQLite 3.0.0 came out on 18 June 2004, and 3.54.1 came out on 16 October 2026. Its developers plan to support it through the year 2050. It came third in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, at 37.5%. The code is in the public domain, so it needs no licence. The file format is documented, and the US Library of Congress lists it as a recommended storage format. SQLite's own guide says sites under 100,000 hits a day work fine with it. Turn on write-ahead logging so readers never wait for the one writer. Choose something else when several servers write to the same data at once, and use PostgreSQL there. Back up the file and test the copy, as Prove restores work says.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

JavaScript example

import Database from 'better-sqlite3';

const BUSY_TIMEOUT_MS = 5000;
const db = new Database('shop.db');
db.pragma('journal_mode = WAL');
db.pragma(`busy_timeout = ${BUSY_TIMEOUT_MS}`);

Python example

import sqlite3

BUSY_TIMEOUT_MS = 5000

db = sqlite3.connect("shop.db")
db.execute("PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL")
db.execute(f"PRAGMA busy_timeout = {BUSY_TIMEOUT_MS}")

How to check

Only one server process opens the database file for writing. PRAGMA journal_mode returns wal, and PRAGMA busy_timeout returns at least 5000.

Sources

• SQLite long-term support
• When to use SQLite

Related rules

• Prove restores work in Data