Simon Willison’s Weblog

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We [Bluesky] took a somewhat novel approach of giving every user their own SQLite database. By removing the Postgres dependency, we made it possible to run a ‘PDS in a box’ [Personal Data Server] without having to worry about managing a database. We didn’t have to worry about things like replicas or failover. For those thinking this is irresponsible: don’t worry, we are backing up all the data on our PDSs!

SQLite worked really well because the PDS – in its ideal form – is a single-tenant system. We owned up to that by having these single tenant SQLite databases.

Daniel Holmgren