SQLite is an incredible piece of software, and its commitment to backward compatibility is deeply admirable. But that same promise has also become a limitation.
v3.0 was first released in 2004—over 20 years ago—and the industry has changed dramatically since then.
I can’t help but wish for a “v4.0” release: one that deliberately breaks backward compatibility and outdated defaults, in order to offer a cleaner, more modern foundation.
Note: I'm not asking for new functionality per se. But just a version of SQLite that defaulted to how it should be used, deployed in 2025.
The focus of that experiment was to find out of LSM-based storage[^1] would prove to be faster. It turned out that LSM, for SQLite's workloads, did not provide enough benefit to justify the upheaval.
v3.0 was first released in 2004—over 20 years ago—and the industry has changed dramatically since then.
I can’t help but wish for a “v4.0” release: one that deliberately breaks backward compatibility and outdated defaults, in order to offer a cleaner, more modern foundation.
Note: I'm not asking for new functionality per se. But just a version of SQLite that defaulted to how it should be used, deployed in 2025.