Lift the hood on most any business application, and you’ll reveal some way to store and use structured data. Whether it’s a client-side app, an app with a web front-end, or an edge-device app, chances are it needs an embedded database of some kind.
SQLite is an embeddable open source database, written in C and queryable with conventional SQL, that is designed to cover those use cases and more. SQLite is designed to be fast, portable, and reliable, whether you’re storing only kilobytes of data or multi-gigabyte blobs.
Where you can use SQLite
One of SQLite’s greatest advantages is that it can run nearly anywhere. SQLite has been ported to a wide variety of platforms: Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and more. Windows users in particular can use precompiled binaries for regular Win32, UWP, WinRT, and .Net. Whatever the deployment target is for your app, odds are there’s an edition of SQLite available for it, or a way to port the C source code to that target.
Apps that use SQLite don’t have to be written in any particular language, as long as there is some way to bind and work with external libraries written in C. SQLite’s binaries are self-contained, so they require no particular magic to deploy—they can simply be dropped into the same directory as the application.
