SQLite Is All You Need for Durable Workflows? Sounds Like Heresy, But They Have Arguments

Ever looked at your workflow management stack and thought, "Isn't this overkill?" If so, the article from Obelisk is your balm. The authors claim that for durable workflows (the kind that survive crashes without losing a single event), plain SQLite is enough. No Kafka, no PostgreSQL, no dancing around distributed queues.

The idea is simple: SQLite isn't just a toy database. Thanks to WAL mode and BEGIN IMMEDIATE, it can act as a reliable queue. Instead of building a menagerie of RabbitMQ and Redis, you write events to a local SQLite, and workers read from there. If a process crashes — no worries, the transaction rolls back, and the event stays in the queue.

Of course, there are caveats. SQLite doesn't do replication or clustering out of the box, so it's not for high-traffic systems. But for startups, internal tools, or projects with a few thousand events per second, it's a perfectly viable setup. Plus, you eliminate the headache of configuring and monitoring extra services.

The authors provide concrete examples: how to configure SQLite as a queue, how to handle errors, and how to scale horizontally with multiple instances sharing storage. In short, a read for those tired of overengineering and wanting to get back to basics.

METABYTE studio comment: SQLite is like a Swiss Army knife — simple, but if you get the hang of it, you can assemble IKEA furniture and fix a server. Just don't try to hammer nails in production with a million RPS. But for prototypes and internal systems — why not?