In September 2014, Philip O'Toole announced rqlite, a system combining SQLite with Raft consensus to replicate writes across a cluster, preventing data loss from node failures. This made rqlite the first open-source project to merge Raft and SQLite, a pioneering move in what has since become a thriving 'distributed SQLite' category with venture-funded projects and acquisitions.
Before rqlite, Expensify's Bedrock (2016) and Actor DB explored similar ideas but lacked broader adoption. rqlite's success came from making the solution standalone and general-purpose. In 2017, Canonical launched dqlite, a similar library-focused approach for embedding replicated storage in LXD and Micro K8s, differing mainly in packaging.
A paradigm shift arrived in 2021 with Litestream, which streams SQLite WAL to S3 for disaster recovery without consensus, addressing the more common need of recovering from a single-machine failure. Fly.io's Lite FS (2022) extended this by replicating SQLite at the filesystem level using Consul leases. By 2022, new projects like cr-sqlite further expanded the ecosystem, while rqlite's v8.0 incorporated WAL handling inspired by Litestream.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing