Richard Hipp, announcing SQLite version 3.39.0 in their forums:

If you prefer, you can experiment with the latest 3.39.0 code directly in your web-browser and without having to download or install anything by visiting sqlite.org/fiddle/. (The page name is by analogy to sites like “JSFiddle” and “SQLFiddle”.)

The page runs a WASM-compiled copy of a recent 3.39.0 build in a sandbox in your web browser. Using controls on that page, you can import database files from your local machine (assuming they aren’t too big), work with them, then export any changes back to your desktop.

WebAssembly FTW!

This hit my radar a few times in the past year – this week, and then most recently a few months back when we had Richard Hipp on The Changelog (again) – but, I didn’t post it to the newsfeed.

Here’s what’s interesting about the SQLite test suite – it’s their secret sauce…the sustaining enablement of building a support business around SQLite. Here’s a direct quote from Richard Hipp in that episode.

Originally we thought we were gonna sell this and make money from it, and that’s how we were gonna support ongoing development. That didn’t really play out, nobody ever bought it. It does sort of become our business value, our intellectual property. I mean, you can take the SQLite code and fork it and start your own thing…but you don’t have the full test suite. You’ve got a lot of tests, but not all of them. So we’ve got a little bit of advantage over you there.

Click here to play that episode from this quote.

This week, Richard Hipp returns to catch us up on all things SQLite, his single file webserver written in C called Althttpd, and Fossil – the source code manager he wrote and uses to manage SQLite development instead of Git.

Fossil deliberately omits a “rebase” command because the original designer of Fossil (and original author of this article) considers rebase to be an anti-pattern to be avoided. This article attempts to explain that point of view.

Read this article by SQLite/Fossil creator Richard Hipp to prep for next week’s episode of The Changelog. 😉

Althttpd is a simple webserver that has run the sqlite.org website since 2004. Althttpd strives for simplicity, security, and low resource usage.

As of 2018, the althttpd instance for sqlite.org answers about 500,000 HTTP requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 50GB of content per day (about 4.6 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average on this machine normally stays around 0.1 or 0.2. About 19% of the HTTP requests are CGI to various Fossil source-code repositories.

Richard has a knack for creating simple, high quality tools. When we did our (now legendary) show with him back in 2016, he was quite keen on coming back at some point to discuss Fossil. Should we make that happen?

This episode is part of our remastered greatest hits collection and features Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, talking with us about its history, where it came from, why it has succeeded as a database, how its development has been sustainably funded, and the how and why of it being the most widely deployed database engine in the world.