05-31, 15:10–15:40 (Europe/London), Music Hall
Why the world's most popular database is a good option for your app in production, despite the advice of the official Django documentation.
Video: https://youtu.be/yTicYJDT1zE
SQLite is a popular option for the local development of Django applications. It's built-in to Python, and it's well supported by the Django. However, the standard advice, both from the official documentation and from the community in general, is that it's not the right tool for running your app in production.
In this talk I'll argue that it's time to change this position. In many cases, SQLite is the fastest database option available to Django developers. It's always the cheapest and the most energy efficient. The traditional concerns about concurrent writes can be handled through new configuration options, and the limits on horizontal scalability can be addressed through innovative approaches developed and funded by companies like Fly.io and Cloudflare.
I'll use real-world examples to compare SQLite's performance against the traditional database options for production. I'll also explore some of the exciting new developments in the SQLite ecosystem, particularly those which enable its use in machine learning in general, and LLMs (large language models) in particular.
I'm the co-founder and CTO at Torchbox, the UK-based digital agency working (mainly in Django) for organisations who make the world a better place. I lead a global community of developers behind Wagtail, the open source product which was created by Torchbox and is now the world's most popular Python CMS, used by Google, NASA, Mozilla and the NHS, as well as universities, governments, artists, newspapers, charities, banks and startups around the world.