Question

For reasons that are irrelevant to this question I’ll need to run several SQLite databases instead of the more common MySQL for some of my projects, I would like to know how SQLite compares to MySQL in terms of speed and performance regarding disk I/O (the database will be hosted in a USB 2.0 pen drive).

I’ve read the Database Speed Comparison page at http://www.sqlite.org/speed.html and I must say I was surprised by the performance of SQLite but since those benchmarks are a bit old I was looking for a more updated benchmark (SQLite 3 vs MySQL 5), again my main concern is disk performance, not CPU/RAM.

Also since I don’t have that much experience with SQLite I’m also curious if it has anything similar to the TRIGGER (on update, delete) events in the InnoDB MySQL engine. I also couldn’t find any way to declare a field as being UNIQUE like MySQL has, only PRIMARY KEY – is there anything I’m missing?

As a final question I would like to know if a good (preferably free or open source) SQLite database manager exists.

Answer 1

A few questions in there:

1. In terms of disk I/O limits, I wouldn’t imagine that the database engine makes a lot of difference. There might be a few small things, but I think it’s mostly just whether the database can read/write data as fast as your application wants it to. Since you’d be using the same amount of data with either MySQL or SQLite, I’d think it won’t change much.
2. SQLite does support triggers: CREATE TRIGGER Syntax
3. SQLite does support UNIQUE constraints: column constraint definition syntax.
4. To manage my SQLite databases, I use the Firefox Add-on SQLite Manager. It’s quite good, does everything I want it to.