“Most people hear SQL database engine, and they’re thinking Oracle - something big that you run your whole enterprise on. “I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, ‘Richard, why don’t you just write one?'” During a temporary shutdown of government contracts (which had lasted a few months), “I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.'”īack in 2006, Hipp tried to explain SQLite’s appeal to an audience at Google. Hipp wondered if there was a way his team could pull its data straight from the database without an external dependency. There’s going to be a lot of stuff broken, and people are going to be crazy, and there’s going to be smoke and blood and chaos - and in a situation like that they don’t want a dialog box that says, ‘Cannot connect to database server.'” But what do you do if you can’t connect to the server? So we got the blame all the same, because we were painting the dialog box.”Īnd, as Hipp noted, “it’s a warship.” So besides the ship being continually in use, “the idea is it’s supposed to be able to work if you take battle damage! So it’s more than one pipe breaking. “A dialog box would pop up, they’d double click on the thing, and a dialog box would pop up that says, ‘Can’t connect to database server.’ It wasn’t our fault - we didn’t have any control over the database server. “That was embarrassing,” Hipp recalled to Bell. The software would operate on crucial data about the ship’s valves (for routing around pipe ruptures), and their stack had included Informix, which unfortunately stopped working whenever the server went down. Back in the year 2000, Hipp was working for Bath Iron Works, a shipbuilding subsidiary of defense contractor General Dynamics, and was building software for a Navy destroyer (the USS Oscar Austin). The story begins in a shipyard in Bath, Maine (population: 8,329). “SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files.”īut crucially, it’s also open source, which leads Bell’s podcast to an intriguing question: What happens if your fun side project ends up powering the world? And the host promises that, along the way, the interview will explore the dilemma which still haunts the open source movement today: How to survive becoming core infrastructure for the world.īell points out that SQLite is now installed in everything from web browsers to commercial airplanes, as well as popular software like iMessage and WhatsApp.īut the software was born out of Hipp’s frustration with a database that was installed on a battleship. “Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process,” its official page explains. Because it’s contained in a library of C code, SQLite can be easily embedded into other software, and it’s fully self-contained. In a little more than two decades, it’s become the most widely deployed database in the world, according to the official webpage at - partly due to its simplicity. Motorola wanted to license it for phones, so he gave them the biggest $ figure he could think of: $80K □ Last week Adam Gordon Bell brought a special guest onto his podcast Corecursive: Richard Hipp, the main author of SQLite.ĭev invented the most popular database, SQLite, to eliminate server risk on a US battleship.
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