The Social Miracle: rqlite with Philip O’Toole

rqlite is a lightweight, distributed relational database built on Raft and SQLite. Founder Philip O’Toole (@general_order24) decided to combine these technologies while working at a startup years ago. The startup no longer exists, but rqlite is going strong. Today, Philip is an engineering manager at Google, while he continues to be the driving force behind the open development of rqlite.

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In this episode we discuss:

• The biggest misconceptions about how rqlite differs from SQLite

• Why writing databases is more interesting than new programmers might think

• The tradeoff between a large community versus smaller, more focused leadership

• Reasons why open-source development progresses in bursts of energy

• How to really pronounce “rqlite”

Links:

• rqlite

• InfluxData

• dqlite

• Litestream

• libSQL

• Turso

• OpenTelemetry

People:

• Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson)

Other episodes:

• libSQL with Glauber Costa