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List:       dbi-users
Subject:    Re: Comments on stability of SQLite for storage
From:       Hildo Biersma <Hildo.Biersma () morganstanley ! com>
Date:       2007-08-01 12:41:22
Message-ID: 46B07F72.3050908 () morganstanley ! com
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Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I'm beginning a project where I have to store some stuff on the disk
> somehow. At present, I'm using SQLite *only* for temporary storage. I
> had planned to dump data ( which is basically config data, but is
> absolutely critical in terms of keeping the project held together ) to
> either XML or CSV, but now this is getting more cumbersome that I'd
> expected.
> 
> Who has some anecdotal evidence about the reliability of SQLite files
> for storing data? Should I drop the XML / CSV idea and just use SQLite?

I don't see this as DBI-related, but hey...

You obviously need some form of backups of your data.  Whether you do 
that by a copy of the SQLite database files or through a dump into 
XML/CSV is entirely up to you.

If you have the desire to process or view the data through some form 
other than SQLite (e.g. grep/sort), then using CSV or other textual 
formats such as XML makes sense.

If you care about getting the data as it was at an arbitrary point in 
time, you need a real database that does transactional logging and log 
archiving.  It sounds like you need less than that, in which case just 
copying the SQLite files should be sufficient.

Whatever you do, make sure you test querying the backed-up files and 
make sure you have some sort of script that shows the difference in 
contents between archived files (in whatever form) and the current 
state.  If you archive files in non-SQLite format, make sure you can 
recreate the database from the archived files - and test this for each 
major release of your project.
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