Twelve Years of Distributed SQLite
The creator of rqlite reflects on the 12-year history of the distributed SQLite project, which pioneered the use of the Raft consensus protocol for relational databases. The article details the technical evolution of the project and its transition from a niche experiment to a foundational component in the modern distributed systems landscape.
Why it matters
It provides historical context for the rise of distributed SQL databases, which are now critical infrastructure for modern cloud-native applications.
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite . The idea was simple: take SQLite , put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As far as I can tell, that was the first open-source system to combine Raft and SQLite. Nobody else was doing it, and for several years nobody else tried.
Today “distributed SQLite” is a category with a dozen projects in it, a few of them venture-funded, two of them acquired. Since the people now writing about the category tend to start the story around 2021, I thought I should write down the version that starts in 2014. I was there for all of it.
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