The Duke of SQLite: Litestream with Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) is the creator of Litestream and LiteFS, two open-source disaster recovery solution for SQLite. Litestream is designed to provide continuous backups for SQLite databases by streaming incremental changes, allowing for easy data recovery in the event of a server crash. LiteFS, on the other hand, is built on LiteStream but uses transactional control to focus on replication and high availability. Join us as Ben discusses the challenges and trade-offs of open source contributions and the future of databases.

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In this episode we discuss:

• The history of how Ben got involved in SQLite development out of “spite”

• How Litestream “works on a fluke”

• Different use cases for Litestream vs LiteFS

• Why fully open contributions isn’t always Ben’s style

• The greater server-side SQLite landscape

Links:

• Litestream

• LiteFS

• Fly.io

• BoltDB 

People mentioned:

• Philip O’Toole (@general_order24)

Other episodes:

• The Social Miracle: rqlite with Philip O’Toole

• The Big Fork: libSQL with Glauber Costa