SQLite vs PostgreSQL

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.

PostgreSQL performance increases with each release, this is also proven by many benchmark tests.

Notable performance features include:

• As PostgreSQL only supports one storage engine, it has been able to integrate and optimise it and with the rest of the database. This has resulted in multiple benefits such as the ability to allow different transaction types to co-exist efficiently without the need to select storage engine types once for each table ahead of time.

• On the fly data compression resulting in less IO required for reading.

• Asynchronous + synchronous Replication.

• PostgreSQL supports a asynchronous API for use by client applications. It is reported to increase performance by up to 40% and is not supported by MySQL.

• Designed to scale very well with large numbers of cores at high concurrency levels.

PostgreSQL is known to have a very holistic approach to robustness and data integrity which is reflected by it being fully ACID compliant.

PostgreSQL has always been strict about making sure data is valid before allowing it into the database, and there is no way for a client to bypass those checks.

Depending on your requirements, ACID compliance might be important.

PostgreSQL has a strong community backing it, with guides, tutorials and support for any kind of problem a developer may have.

JSON data can be stored as a column with optional indexes. In 9.4 (upcoming at the time of this writing), JSONB will be a binary version of JSON that will save space. It's like the best of the NO-SQL world without having to give up ACID and Relationships. This means that cascading deletes can be done in a single Transaction across multiple JSON documents.

Regular fixes and features are released

PostgreSQL can be extended to have geographic object support through PostGIS and allows for location queries to be run through SQL.

There are many packages (like Sequelize) that integrate deeply with the features Postgres offers.

Postgres supports popular languages for coding stored procedures, such as Perl and Python. So, you can fairly easy transform just DB-server to reliable Service with complex business logic.

It is a powerful, open source product that has all the bells and whistles when compared with its costly, proprietary counterparts.