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Add to SafariWhen comparing MySQL vs SQLite, the Slant community recommends MySQL for most people. In the question“What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?” MySQL is ranked 6th while SQLite is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose MySQL is:
MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Scalable
MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
Pro Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL
Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development.
Pro Easy to start working with
Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner.
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.
Cons
Con Error messages usually are not very detailed
When you are trying to do something in MySQL and something goes wrong it will simply give you an error message with an error code. Which does not say much about what went wrong unless you look it up online. This can be a little cumbersome during development.
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.
