[Owncloud] SQLite vs MariaDB/MySQL

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Saturday, January 11, 2014 13:18:33 Jakub Moscicki wrote:
> As a user I don't know the product strategy of Owncloud Inc. but technically
> it is completely clear that sqlite could only be useful for small single
> user installations (like on your NAS at home) or demos.
> 
> For anything bigger you should go for a real database, gradually scaling the
> setup (from db collocated with the web server, then dedicated db server
> finally dedicated db cluster). The DB schema shipped with owncloud is not
> optimized so you need to do that yourself (indices,partitions,…) according
> to your usage. If you can install mysql./mariadb easily on your system then
> I would actually recommend that you always do that rather than sqlite. This
> may be collocated with the web server if you have just on web server
> anyway… That's the minimal reasonable setup IMO.
> 
> Sorry I don't have benchmarks at hand but not sure if this real needs
> benchmarking ;-)

Playing devil's advocate here: I really like the option to use sqlite instead 
of MySQL, for the following reasons:

- It requires less memory when the installation is idle (no daemon running)
- It's a lot easier to setup, no fiddling with a database daemon, creating a 
  db user, password management, exposing passwords in the webroot
- It's way easier to backup and migrate, no SQL dumping and importing, just 
  copying of files in one directory

Sure, performance with MySQL/MariaDB might be a a lot better, but ease of 
maintenance and setup can also be important. In the end, it's up to the user 
to make an informed choice which storage backend to use in a given case, and 
to be more comfortable when making this decisions, benchmarks, or even rough 
guidelines would be very useful, maybe even a recommendation how to measure 
performance of different aspects (reaction time of the server, memory 
consumption, especially).

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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