Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016)
SQLite is a wonderful database. We use it in production many times over for all of our clients. Not having to worry about whatever arbitrary SQL Server installation is available in a particular environment has saved us so much time and frustration. Combine SQLite with .NET Self-Contained Deployments means that we (our automated tools) now copy our software distribution zip to target, extract to path, run executable as administrator and walk away. Without SQLite we could not do this.<p>Migrations are also hilariously easy with SQLite if you use the user_version pragma. We have a monotonically-incrementing number to indicate each version. Our migrator first queries this upon startup and runs all the migrations that exist between current user_version and whatever our highest sequence # is (defined as a constant in code). Some might argue that you should just use EF (or whatever language-specific ORM), but I prefer the level of control and the substantial performance boost you get with raw SQL and a simple migrator approach. I cannot speak for EF Core, but EF6 performance was absolutely abysmal in some more complex cases.<p>I would also say that performance might surprise you if you turn on WAL. I have saturated NVMe disks inserting lots of data into SQLite. The trick is to use a single connection and let SQLite handle the serialization for you, rather than try to manage multiple connections to the same file in code (i.e. one connection per logical operation sucks for SQLite).