SQLite to become default backend (was: Fwd: Re: March/April KDE PIM summary blog post)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Ian Douglas - 27.04.23, 20:26:15 CEST:
> On Thursday, 27 April 2023 10:57:57 SAST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > Whether existing setups will be switched automatically I do not
> > know.
> > Might be difficult to get right for all setups and may come
> > unexpected. If it can be done, probably better after asking first
> 
> A long long time ago, when I was still on Win 3.1, I used a mail
> program / news reader that stored everything in one file.
> 
> One day I got a bad sector (or some other error), and the file became
> corrupted, and I lost everything.
> 
> After that I decided to never rely on databases that put everything in
> one file.

I never lost a single record in a single SQLite database so far.

> I also switched to mail clients that use maildir structure rather than
> mbox. I had colleagues using Outlook with similar "everything in one
> file" madness, who also had problems when something goes wrong.

On first sight certainly a good argument and a good argument to continue 
using PostgreSQL but I decided to go from my practical experience and 
that practical experience tells me that all the SQLite databases I use 
and those are quite many including a 889 MiB large Quassel IRC database 
as well as the dozen of SQLite database Firefox creates and the Digikam 
database and… and… and… none of them required any maintenance so far. As 
for Firefox a long time I did not even know it uses SQLite. At some 
point I still bothered to vacuum some Firefox databases once in a while, 
but nowadays I have the impression that often enough is just micro 
optimizing stuff.

Not sure whether I am just lucky, but in the end whether its one file or 
many files does not matter all that much for me. Cause depending on the 
format of a file and the implementation of how the file is accessed I 
believe that even a single large file can be handled in a very resilient 
way. Not sure whether SQLite does that, but my current practical 
experience with Akonadi database is:

- MariaDB => need occasional maintenance, okay might be fixed with latest 
Akonadi as I think it does upgrade the MariaDB database itself now.
- PostgreSQL => needs regular manual PostgreSQL cluster migration for 
every major new version

My hope is that with SQLite I can just use applications that use Akonadi 
just like every other application: As an user. Not as a database 
administrator.

Simple as that.

So I will give it a chance as it worked well enough in many other cases 
for me. And then we will see.

You are free to use PostgreSQL or MariaDB with one file per table.

Best,
-- 
Martin