SQLite: 35% Faster Than The Filesystem

"So let your take-away be this: read/write latency for SQLite is competitive with read/write latency of individual files on disk. Often SQLite is faster. Sometimes SQLite is almost as fast. Either way, this article disproves the common assumption that a relational database must be slower than direct filesystem I/O."

I ran the tests on my machine and for SQLite blob reads I got a 47% improvement over the (HFS) file system.

Does this really matter? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to know about and depending on your usage this might be a win. However, there's something awesome going on here that I really want to write about:

SQLite is so pragmatic and straightforward it makes me ache. Read the post, download the sample test file and amalgamation source and run it yourself. It's so easy that you can cut and paste single line compile commands from their article and it'll just compile and run.

Did you see any warnings? Did it just compile and do its thing? Did you notice there wasn't a ./configure script with various options that you pass, hope it works, then type "make" and cross your fingers?

SQLite is the most widely used database on the planet, it's amazingly solid, and from a developer's point of view It Just Works.

I love SQLite so much.

P.S. Don't forget about FMDB. It's cool too.