Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups
Register | Login

SQLite VS Delta Lake

Compare SQLite VS Delta Lake and see what are their differences

DocRaptor
As the only API powered by the Prince HTML-to-PDF engine, DocRaptor provides the best support for complex PDFs with powerful support for headers, page breaks, page numbers, flexbox, watermarks, accessible PDFs, and much more featured
Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.
Contents:
  1. » Base Details
  2. » Videos
  3. » Reviews
  4. » Alternatives

SQLite logo SQLite

SQLite Home Page

Delta Lake logo Delta Lake

Application and Data, Data Stores, and Big Data Tools
  • SQLite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Delta Lake Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-26

SQLite features and specs

  • Zero Configuration
    SQLite does not require any server setup or configuration, allowing for easy integration and deployment in applications.
  • Lightweight
    It is extremely lightweight, with a small footprint, making it ideal for embedded systems and mobile applications.
  • Self-Contained
    SQLite is self-contained, meaning it has minimal external dependencies, which simplifies its distribution and usage.
  • File-Based Storage
    Data is stored in a single file, which makes it easy to manage and transfer databases as simple files.
  • ACID Compliance
    SQLite supports Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) properties, ensuring reliable transactions.
  • Cross-Platform
    SQLite is available on numerous platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, providing a broad compatibility range.
  • Public Domain
    SQLite operates under the public domain, allowing for unrestricted use in commercial and non-commercial applications.

Possible disadvantages of SQLite

  • Limited Scalability
    SQLite is not designed to handle high levels of concurrency and large-scale databases, making it less suitable for large, high-traffic applications.
  • Write Performance
    Write operations can be slower compared to server-based databases, especially under heavy write loads.
  • Lack of Certain Features
    SQLite lacks some advanced features offered by other RDBMS like stored procedures, user-defined functions, and full-text search indexing.
  • Security
    As SQLite is file-based, it might lack some of the security features present in server-based databases, such as sophisticated access control.
  • Concurrency
    SQLite uses a locking mechanism to control access to the database, which can lead to contention and performance bottlenecks in highly concurrent environments.
  • Backup and Restore
    While it's straightforward to copy SQLite database files, it lacks the advanced backup and restore features found in more complex RDBMS.

Delta Lake features and specs

  • ACID Transactions
    Delta Lake provides ACID transaction capabilities, which ensure data integrity and reliability across operations, allowing for data consistency even in the case of concurrent reads and writes.
  • Time Travel
    Delta Lake enables time travel, allowing users to query snapshots of data at different points in the past. This feature is useful for auditing, debugging, and recovering data.
  • Scalability
    Delta Lake is built on top of Apache Spark, allowing it to scale efficiently across big data workloads and handle large volumes of data with ease.
  • Schema Evolution
    Delta Lake supports schema evolution, allowing schema changes such as adding or deleting columns, without significantly affecting data ingestion or requiring rewrite of historical data.
  • Unified Batch and Streaming
    Delta Lake offers support for both batch and streaming data processing, simplifying data pipelines and reducing the complexity of data workflows.

Possible disadvantages of Delta Lake

  • Complexity
    Delta Lake introduces additional complexity due to the need to manage Delta tables and understand Delta-specific features and configurations.
  • Storage Costs
    The features of Delta Lake, such as ACID compliance and time travel, can increase storage costs, as they often require versioning and additional metadata.
  • Dependency on Spark
    Delta Lake is tightly integrated with Apache Spark, which means that it's best utilized within a Spark ecosystem, limiting flexibility if different processing engines are preferred.
  • Learning Curve
    Adopting Delta Lake may require a learning curve for teams unfamiliar with its architecture and features, potentially slowing down initial adoption.
  • Performance Overhead
    The transactional features and capabilities of Delta Lake can introduce some performance overhead, particularly when handling very large datasets with frequent updates.

Analysis of SQLite

Overall verdict

  • SQLite is an excellent choice for a variety of use cases, particularly where ease of use, scalability for smaller applications, and integration simplicity are prioritized. Its robust feature set and extensive community support make it a reliable option for many developers.

Why this product is good

  • SQLite is highly regarded for its efficiency, simplicity, and portability. It is a self-contained, serverless database engine that requires no configuration, making it easy to integrate into applications. Its zero-configuration system and minimal setup offer a lightweight solution that supports complex queries with ACID compliance. SQLite is also used widely due to its high reliability and performance, and it is included by default in several programming environments.

Recommended for

  • Small to medium-sized applications
  • Embedded devices and IoT applications
  • Mobile applications
  • Testing and prototyping
  • Internal or standalone tools and applications
  • Education and learning environments

SQLite videos

+ Add

SQLite | What, Why , Where

More videos:

  • Review - W20 PROG1442 3.3 UWP sqLite Review
  • Tutorial - How To Create SQLite Databases From Scratch For Beginners - Full Tutorial

Delta Lake videos

+ Add

A Thorough Comparison of Delta Lake, Iceberg and Hudi

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Delta Lake for apache Spark | How does it work | How to use delta lake | Delta Lake for Spark ACID
  • Review - ACID ORC, Iceberg, and Delta Lake—An Overview of Table Formats for Large Scale Storage and Analytics

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to SQLite and Delta Lake)

SQLite

Delta Lake

Databases
96 96%
Databases
4% 4
Office & Productivity
0 0%
Office & Productivity
100% 100
Relational Databases
100 100%
Relational Databases
0% 0
Development
0 0%
Development
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using SQLite and Delta Lake. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Delta Lake should be more popular than SQLite. It has been mentiond 35 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

SQLite mentions (18)

  • Can I have my Lightroom catalogue pointing at two sources...?
    Yes. A Lightroom catalog file is, after all, just a SQLite database. (Srsly, make a copy of your catalog file, rename it whatever.sqlite and use your favorite SQLite GUI to rip it open and look at the tables and fields). It's just storing the pathame to the RAW file for that file's record in the database. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Building a database to search Excel files
    I use visidata with a playback script I recorded to open the sheet to a specific Excel tab, add a column, save the sheet as a csv file. Then I have a sqlite script that takes the csv file and puts it in a database, partitioned by monthYear. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Saw this on my friends Snapchat story, this hurts my heart
    Use the most-used database in the world: https://sqlite.org/index.html. Source: over 2 years ago
  • "Managing" a SQLite Database with J (Part 2)
    With this in mind, I wrote a few versions of this post, but I hated them all. Then I realized that jodliterate PDF documents mostly do what I want. So, instead of rewriting MirrorXref.pdf, I will make a few comments about jodliterate group documents in general. If you're interested in using SQLite with J, download the self-contained GitHub files MirrorXref.ijs and MirrorXref.pdf and have a look. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • "Managing" a SQLite Database with J (Part 1)
    SQLite, by many estimates, is the most widely deployed SQL database system on Earth. It's everywhere. It's in your phone, your laptop, your cameras, your car, your cloud, and your breakfast cereal. SQLite's global triumph is a gratifying testament to the virtues of technical excellence and the philosophy of "less is more.". - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

Delta Lake mentions (35)

  • Twitter's 600-Tweet Daily Limit Crisis: Soaring GCP Costs and the Open Source Fix Elon Musk Ignored
    Delta Lake: Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that provides ACID transactions, scalable metadata management, and data versioning on top of existing data lakes. It aims to bring reliability and performance optimizations to big data workloads while ensuring data integrity and consistency. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Stream Processing Systems in 2025: RisingWave, Flink, Spark Streaming, and What's Ahead
    When it comes to stream processing systems, Iceberg support varies across vendors. Databricks, which oversees Spark Streaming, focuses on Delta Lake. Apache Flink, heavily influenced by Alibaba’s contributions, promotes Paimon, an alternative to Iceberg. RisingWave, on the other hand, fully embraces Iceberg. Rather than focusing solely on one table format, RisingWave aims to support various catalog services,... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 25 Open Source AI Tools to Cut Your Development Time in Half
    Delta Lake is a storage layer framework that provides reliability to data lakes. It addresses the challenges of managing large-scale data in lakehouse architectures, where data is stored in an open format and used for various purposes, like machine learning (ML). Data engineers can build real-time pipelines or ML applications using Delta Lake because it supports both batch and streaming data processing. It also... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Make Rust Object Oriented with the dual-trait pattern
    There is a neat example, of how a third party project belonging to the Linux Foundation, is implementing UserDefinedLogicalNodeCore: MetricObserver in delta-rs. The developer had to use only #[derive(Debug, Hash, Eq, PartialEq)] to get dyn_eq and dyn_hash implemented. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Delta Lake vs. Parquet: A Comparison
    Delta is pretty great, let's you do upserts into tables in DataBricks much easier than without it. I think the website is here: https://delta.io. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SQLite and Delta Lake, you can also consider the following products

PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database

Amazon SageMaker - Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.

Microsoft SQL - Microsoft SQL is a best in class relational database management software that facilitates the database server to provide you a primary function to store and retrieve data.

Apache Zeppelin - A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics.

Loading...