SQLite Is All You Need
JayJay
July 14, 2026

I read Prefer STRICT tables in SQLite by Evan Hahn last week, and it got me thinking. Here is someone treating SQLite as a database you put real, typed, production data into. Which raises the obvious question: how far does that actually go?

So we found out. We built a social network on SQLite, 50,000 users and a million posts in a single 343MB file, put it behind a Node API, made every table STRICT on Evan's advice, and hammered it until the numbers stopped being flattering. This post is what came back: the benchmarks, the config, the code, and the places it falls over.