My browser needs a nuclear-equipped walking death-mobile database1 min read

Who thought that using a SQLite database (what I refer to as a nuclear-equipped walking death-mobile) to manage everything (including bookmarks) in Firefox (or other apps) was a clever idea?
metal-gear-rex
A friend of mine was asking me to investigate why Firefox alwas hung when quitting on his Dellbuntu today. After an hour, I found out the culprit:
firefox-placessqlite-fail
See, the horrible thing with databases such as SQLite (according to my limited understanding) is that you have to keep vacuuming them manually all the time because they keep growing exponentially. Liferea suffers the same, and the author seems to have no other solution than manually vacuuming. Evolution having recently started using a sqlite database for mail indexing too is worrying me.
Is this a disease? Somebody explain to me how come it spreads like wildfire when we have such horrible drawbacks? At least, from what I’ve seen by glancing in ~/.config/chromium, Chromium doesn’t use this.


Comments

3 responses to “My browser needs a nuclear-equipped walking death-mobile database1 min read

  1. Did you check if Apple had a workaround since wikipedia says they use it with Spotlight for instance ?

  2. Robin Millette Avatar
    Robin Millette

    Anything to get away from the old Mork file format, yuk! https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Mork_Structure
    I don’t see why applications using sqlite can’t run vacuum once in a while.