Twelve years of distributed SQLite
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
rqlite creator Philip O'Toole published a history of distributed SQLite, from his 2014 project to a dozen others.
The post argues open-source origins predate the paid services now built on it.
Background
Philip O'Toole is the creator of rqlite, an open-source system that puts SQLite — the small embedded database — behind a Raft log (a consensus protocol that keeps multiple machines in agreement) and replicates every write across a cluster. He built it because a clustered system he worked on needed a small amount of relational storage and there was no good answer to which node should hold it. He wrote the post because, he says, people now writing about the category tend to start the story around 2021, so he wanted a version that starts in 2014.
How it unfolded
- Sep 2014O'Toole published a short post announcing rqlite, putting SQLite behind a Raft log and replicating every write to a cluster; the source went to GitHub that same weekend.
- 2016O'Toole replaced goraft with HashiCorp's Raft implementation, which rqlite still uses. Expensify also released Bedrock, its Paxos-style replicated SQLite, after years of internal use.
- 2017Canonical built dqlite to give LXD and later MicroK8s an embedded replicated store without running etcd.
- 2021Ben Johnson released Litestream, which streams the SQLite WAL to S3 with no consensus.
- 2022Fly.io hired Johnson and shipped LiteFS, replicating SQLite at filesystem level with leases from Consul. cr-sqlite and other projects took approaches neither rqlite nor Litestream had.
- Oct 24, 2026O'Toole's post "Twelve years of distributed SQLite" was posted to Hacker News by otoolep, with 7 points.
Who’s saying what
- Creator
- O'Toole says rqlite was, as far as he can tell, the first open-source system to combine Raft and SQLite, and that the idea was open source for eight years before anyone sold it.
- Caution
- Litestream creator Ben Johnson says most applications do not need a cluster; they run one machine and need recovery if it dies.
Still unverified
O'Toole's claim that rqlite was the first open-source system to combine Raft and SQLite is stated as "as far as I can tell" rather than as a confirmed fact.