SQLite vs MariaDB

SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.

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.

SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system.

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.

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.

With less complication, there is less to go wrong.

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.

All development decisions for MariaDB can be reviewed and debated on a public mailing list or in the public bug tracker. Contributing to MariaDB is easy and the patch flow is fully transparent and public. But it's not all about the code contribution either - MariaDB also has very active documentation efforts and other related things that help developers in their day-to-day database administration.

e.g. GIS since 5.3

MariaDB has dynamic column support which allows for some NoSQL type functionality. So one database interface can provide both SQL and NoSQL for different software development needs.