When comparing SQLite vs CouchDB, the Slant community recommends CouchDB for most people. In the question“What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?” CouchDB is ranked 3rd while SQLite is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose CouchDB is:
CouchDB works very well even when the network is physically partitioned
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Small
SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
Pro Great language support
SQLite has bindings for a large number of programming languages, including BASIC, Delphi, C, C#, C++, Clipper//Harbour, Common Lisp, Curl, D, Free Pascal, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Livecode, Lua, newLisp, Objective-C (on OS X and iOS), OCaml, Perl, PHP, Pike, PureBasic, Python, R, REALbasic, REBOL, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Visual Basic.
Pro Self-contained
SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system.
Pro Portable
An SQLite database is a single ordinary disk file that can be located anywhere in the directory hierarchy. It works by sending requests to a single file where all the data is kept instead of communicating with a hosted database which gives access to an interface by making use of sockets and ports. The file format used is also cross-platform, so can easily be migrated to various machines.
This makes SQLite extremely portable throughout different applications, all that's needed to transfer the whole database is to make a copy of the file.
Pro Great for testing and first stages of development
Because of it's ability to scale and with the portability that a single-file database gives you without losing much of the power and features that SQL gives developers, it's a great choice for testing applications and for the early stages of development when the workload and the data that needs to be stored is not that large.
Pro Not unnecessarily fiddly
Pro Reliable
With less complication, there is less to go wrong.
Pro Zero configuration
There is literally no configuration required to get SQL lite up and running. This is mainly due to SQLite being serverless, there is no separate server process to install, setup, configure, initialize, manage, and troubleshoot.
Pro Works well between physical network partitions
CouchDB works very well even when the network is physically partitioned
Pro Available
CouchDB is considered an available DMS according to the ACP theory of database management. As such it allows every client to always read and write
Pro Useful for applications where versioning is important
CouchDB is mostly used in applications where a large amount of data needs to be accumulated and where data only changes rarely.
Pro Changes API
You can use the RESTful API to listen for changes in your database, which is something most databases can't do. It makes it really easy for clients to keep their view of data up-to-date.
Pro RESTful API
Since everything is stored as a JSON document and served over HTTP, it's perfectly suited for communicating with client-side javascript, with or without middleware.
Cons
Con No multi user
Lacks multi-user capabilities, see SQLite vs. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL: A Comparison of Relational Databases.
Also see: Appropriate Uses For SQLite.
Con Some SQL features are missing
SQLite is made to be extremely lightweight and portable, but it still uses SQL. However, some SQL features such as RIGHT OUTER JOIN
and FOR EACH STATEMENT
are missing.
Con Can only achieve consistency through replication and verification
Since CouchDB is considered an AP (Available, Partition-Tolerant database management system), it is not really consistent (not all clients can have the same view of the data consistently) and the only way to achieve some "eventual consistency" is through replication and verification of data.
Con Uncertain future
After a very promising start, development began to drag after major supporters like Canonical, Selenium and CouchOne either shut down or moved to other tools. Development has begun to pick up again.