Twelve years of distributed SQLite

kept by eddie oct 30

This piece summarizes twelve years of building and scaling distributed systems on SQLite, detailing the architectural decisions, trade-offs, and practical lessons learned from production use.

Protocol-Aware Deterministic Simulation Testing
TigerBeetle’s protocol-aware deterministic simulation testing validates safety and liveness invariants at each replica, enabling deep verification of consensus and storage beyond black‑box methods.
also on FoundationDB, #software-engineering
How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTs
Notion redesigned its text editor with CRDTs and Peritext annotations to merge concurrent edits across blocks without data loss, deploying it to production in July 2025.
also on #distributed-systems, PostgreSQL, #software-engineering
Cheap code means formal verification is reasonable now — Antfly Blog
The Antfly team shows how coding agents using TLA+ can formally model distributed systems to cheaply find and verify race conditions and other bugs.
also on #distributed-systems, #software-engineering
Do you even need a database?
The article argues that for many small-scale, read-heavy, or single-user applications, flat files like JSON can outperform a full DBMS, but warns that scaling or adding write concurrency will force you to rebuild a database.
also on #database, SQLite, PostgreSQL, #performance, #software-engineering
How Tailscale helped find the SQLite WAL-Reset bug
Tailscale engineers and SQLite developers collaborated to identify and fix a rare data race bug in SQLite's WAL checkpointing that caused months of database corruption in Tailscale's control plane.
also on #database, SQLite, #software-engineering