The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite
So the format war of Blue-ray vs. HD-DVD is over. There are still several other rather significant battles going on in the tech world right now that aren’t Microsoft vs. Apple or Yahoo vs. Google. For example:
Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism vs. Microsoft Silverlight
Google Gears vs. HTML5 Offline support
Android vs. iPhone SDK vs. Symbian
Ruby On Rails vs. PHP
Not every case will have a true “winner”. That’s not really a bad thing. Choice is good. In some cases they will merge to form one standard, such as what’s likely for offline web applications.
What is interesting is that SQLite really dominates right now. Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, Android, iPhone SDK (likely through Core Data API), Symbian, Ruby On Rails (default DB in 2.0), PHP 5 (bundled but disabled in PHP.ini by default). It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore that SQL survived the transition from mainframe to server, and now is going from server to client.
No longer is the term “database” purely referring to an expensive RAID5 machine in a datacenter running Oracle, MySQL, DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server. It can now refer to someone’s web browser, or mobile phone.
This has really just begun to have an impact on things. The availability of good information storage, retrieval, and sorting means much less of these poorly concocted solutions and much better applications. Client side databases are the next AJAX.
Edit [2/27/2008 9:14 AM EST]: Added Symbian, since they also use SQLite. Thanks Chris.
Tags: adobe, adobe air, android, Google, google-gears, html5, iphone sdk, microsoft, microsoft silverlight, Mozilla, mozilla prism, php, ruby on rails, software-development, sql, sqlite, Web Development
February 27th, 2008 at 2:24 am
I don’t think there’s a Google Gears vs HTML5 battle — we’re both working closely together, and HTML5 has been learning from Gears and Gears has been leaning towards the HTML5 APIs.
In fact if anything I would say that HTML5 belongs in the “Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism vs. Microsoft Silverlight” line.
February 27th, 2008 at 7:57 am
SQLite is used by Symbian too - actually they are charter members of the SQLite consortium, alongside Mozilla.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:18 am
@Ian Hickson: Good to hear about Google Gears working with HTML5. I hate the idea of multiple platforms.
I’m not so sure I’d put HTML5 with Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism. vs. Microsoft Silverlight. My main reason is that they are all platforms rather than standards. Also Adobe Air uses WebKit, Prism uses Gecko, both likely HTML5 adopters. So Adobe Air is HTML5 proprietary. Mozilla Prism is XUL HTML5. HTML5 not end-user marketable since it’s not a product, it’s a standard. Air, Prism, Silverlight are. Google Gears if it succeeds would likely end up being both since I’m pretty sure Google will push for it and even put their developers on the task of implementing anywhere and everywhere to ensure their Apps work correctly anywhere.
@Chris: good point, I accidentally left them out when putting that list together. Added now.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Another embedded database is Firebird Embedded version. Is multi plataform (win, linux, macOSX, solaris, hp-ux).
http://www.firebirdsql.org
February 27th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[...] Robert Accettura made an interesting post about the range of SQlite today titled “The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite.” This [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 9:58 am
SQLite is absolutely fantastic for embedded applications. Just not having to write code to save and read persistent data, nor to have to ensure its consistency, integrity, etc is is a boon for programmer productivity. A small footprint and pretty good performance doesn’t hurt either. Having SQL at the client means we can get server-side productivity benefits in the client and in embedded devices.
Check out my page at http://www.squidoo.com/sqlitehammer for more discussion on SQLite. Mike Chirico’s page at souptonuts.sourceforge.net is also a great resource on programming SQLite.