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HSQLDB vs SQLite: What are the differences?

Introduction:

HSQLDB and SQLite are both popular relational database management systems (RDBMS) that are commonly used for various applications. While they share similarities in their purpose of managing and manipulating data, there are several key differences between HSQLDB and SQLite.

  1. Architecture: HSQLDB is a server-based RDBMS that operates as a standalone database server, supporting concurrent connections from multiple clients. On the other hand, SQLite is a file-based RDBMS that operates on a single file, making it suitable for embedded systems or client-side applications.

  2. SQL Compatibility: HSQLDB and SQLite have varying degrees of SQL compatibility. HSQLDB supports a wide range of SQL standards, including complex query optimization and advanced features like stored procedures and triggers. SQLite, on the other hand, supports a subset of SQL standards and lacks certain advanced features present in HSQLDB.

  3. Data Durability: In terms of data durability, HSQLDB offers various options, including transaction logging and crash recovery capabilities, making it reliable for mission-critical applications. SQLite, on the other hand, emphasizes simplicity and efficiency, sacrificing some data durability features to ensure lightweight and fast operation.

  4. Concurrency: HSQLDB and SQLite have different approaches to concurrency handling. HSQLDB supports multiple concurrent connections and provides locking mechanisms to ensure data consistency in a multi-user environment. SQLite, on the other hand, employs a file-level locking mechanism, which can cause contention in scenarios with heavy concurrent write operations.

  5. Storage Capacity: HSQLDB imposes a limit on the size of the database files, often restricted by the underlying file system limitations. In contrast, SQLite has much higher capacity limits, allowing for large databases to be managed efficiently.

  6. Portability: SQLite is known for its high portability, as it is implemented as a single C library file that can work across different operating systems without any additional dependencies. HSQLDB, although portable between platforms, may require additional setup and configuration due to its server-based architecture.

In summary, HSQLDB and SQLite differ in their architecture, SQL compatibility, data durability, concurrency handling, storage capacity, and portability.

Advice on HSQLDB and SQLite
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SQLiteSQLite

Hi everyone! I am a high school student, starting a massive project. I'm building a system for a boarding school to be better connected to their students and be more efficient with information. In the meantime, I am developing a website and an android app. What's the best datastore I can use? I need to be able to access student data on the app from the main database and send push notifications. Also feed updates. What's the best approach? What's the best tool I can use to deploy the website and the database? One for testing and prototyping, and an official one... Thanks in advance!!!!

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Replies (3)
Ahmed AlAskalany
Android Developer at Kitab Sawti · | 5 upvotes · 336.9K views
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FirebaseFirebase

Firebase has Android, iOS, and Web SDKs; and a console where you can develop, manage, and monitor all the data and analytics from one place. Firebase real-time database is good for online presence and instant feed updates, while Firebase Firestone is good for user profile and other relational data records. Firebase has a UI SDK which makes it easy to interface with the resources in the project, and with tons of tutorials and starter projects it should be easy to quickly have a decent prototype to iterate upon. Since you said Massive, use their pricing calculator to figure if your expected scale will be covered by the free quota or if you go for the pay-as-you-go that the price is reasonable for your project.

Good luck with the project!

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Paul Whittemore
Developer and Owner at Appurist Software · | 4 upvotes · 337.1K views
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FirebaseFirebase

It sounds like a server-client relationship (central database) and while SQLite is probably the simplest, note that its performance is probably the worst of the top 20 or so choices you have. It is different from Firebase and MySQL (and most other databases) in that it is embedded in the product, although it could be embedded in your server itself.

MySQL would require a separate MySQL db server, which means either two servers (one for MySQL, and one to provide your specific services to your client app) or both running on a single server machine. There are many alternatives in the same category as MySQL, and a choice of relational databases or document (NoSQL) databases. But architecturally, they are in the same category as MySQL, a separate db server that your application server would get its data from.

Firebase is different yet again, in that it is a service that is already hosted by a company, providing many integrated features such as authentication and storage of user account info. However it does take care of many of the concerns with running a server, such as performance, scalability and management. There are some negatives that you should be aware of though: any investment of time and coding with Firebase is pretty much non-portable, in that you are stuck with Firebase going forward. If you needed to switch to a different service, not only would it be a different API, but it would be a different architecture and much of your coding would need to be discarded. Second, it's owned and run by Google now, so you have a large corporation backing it, but that also means they could decide to discontinue it without any real effect on the Google bottom line. Also some folks would have concerns with storing data on Google servers. That said, I think if you are aware of these in advance, and especially if you are a high school student, that Firebase is a fairly easy winner here. The server is already set up for you, the documentation is very complete and rich, with lots of examples, and Google is not going away. The main concern would be if it really is massive, there could be a rising cost to the service. I suspect though that it is not massive, even if everyone in a school used it. The number of concurrent connections would not be huge (probably not even into the hundreds, even if there are thousands of users).

I'd go with Firebase even though you will need to learn their API, because you'll need to learn something one way or another. SQLite is a bit of a toy database, and MySQL is a real one but you (or someone) would need to manage that server on top of needing to develop the server and client app. With Firebase, much of the server already exists, including a professionally hosted database. There are tons of high-level features provided and initial cost is somewhere between very low and zero.

Part of this is dependent on what language you want to write this in. Javascript for a cross-platform client app (I'd use Vue.js + Vuetify for UI, and provide it as a web app and optionally wrap that with Electron for a desktop app, Apache Cordova for mobile). Server could be Javascript with an Express-based REST API on Node.js, talking to Firebase for services.

If you were a Java developer though, all this goes out the window and I'd recommend a simple Java server with Javalin for REST API, and embedded ObjectDB for database storage (combined into one server). ObjectDB is very very fast and can be separated out into a scalable server if this became truly massive. But you would probably never need to go that far.

All of this is a lot of work. I hope this isn't for something like an assignment. It is in the order of 6 months of work if you know what you're doing, all year if you're learning as you go.

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Michael Maraist
Chief Architect at Pixia Corp · | 2 upvotes · 336.4K views
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Don't think you can go wrong with MySQL or postgresql. python+postgres is VERY well supported stack and can do almost anything. Great visualization and administrative tools for both. There are some data-mismatch problems, however.. node.js/python with mongodb is a bit more modern and makes it trivial to "serialize" data with sprinklings of indexes. If you're using go-lang, then RocksDB is a great high-performance data-modeling base (it's not relational how-ever) It's more like a building-block for key-value store. But it's ACID so you CAN build relational systems on top. I've used LevelDB for other projects (Java/C) (similar architecture and works great on android - chrome uses it for it's metadata-storage). Rock/Level can achieve multi-million writes on cheap hardware thanks to it's trade-offs.

I'm very familiar with SQLite.. Personally my least favorite, but it's the most portable database format, and it does support ACID.. I have many gripes, but biggest issue is parallel access (you really need a single process/thread to own the data-model, then use IPC to communicate with your process/thread).. (same could be said for LevelDB, but that's so efficient, it's almost never an issue).

If your'e using Java, then JavaDB/DerbyDB/HSQLDB are EXCELLENT systems.. highly multi-threaded, good stand-alone tools. (embedded or TCP-connected). Perfect for unit-tests. Can use simple dumb portable formats (e.g. text-file containing only inserts) all the way to classic journaled binary B-tree formats to pure-in-memory. Java has a lot of overhead, so this is only really viable if you're already using Java in your project.

For high performance "memsql" is mysql API to a hybrid in-memory index + on-disk column-database (feels like classic SQL to you though). Falls into the mysql-swiss-army-knife tool-kit.

Similarly with in-memory there is "redis".. Absolutely a joy to work with. It too is a specialty swiss army knife. Steer clear of redis for primary data that you can't lose.. while redis does support persisting data, it isn't very efficient and will become the bottleneck. redis is great for micro-queue's, topics, stat-aggregators, message-repositories (password-management systems, where writes are rare so persistance is viable). Plus I love that redis uses a pure-text protocol so I can netcat or telnet directly into it and do stuff.

I've loved cloud-data-stores.. Amazon "DynamoDB" or Google BigTable are awesome!!! Cheap compared to normal hosting fees of an AWS EC2 instance.. You can play all day.. put a terabyte up, then blow it away.. pay for what you play with. It's a very very different data-model though.. They give you a very very few set of tricks that let you do complex data-modeling - and you have to be clever and have enough foresight to not block yourself into a hole (or have customer abuse expensive queries).

Then there's Cassandra/Hadoop (HBase). These are petabyte scale databases (technically so is Dynamo/BigTable). They're incredibly efficient at what they do. And they have a lot of plugins to do almost anything you need. I personally love these the best (and RocksDB/LevelDB are like their infant children offspring). You can run these on your laptop (unlike Amazon/Google engines above). But their discipline is very different than all the other's above.

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Pros of HSQLDB
Pros of SQLite
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 163
      Lightweight
    • 135
      Portable
    • 122
      Simple
    • 81
      Sql
    • 29
      Preinstalled on iOS and Android
    • 2
      Free
    • 2
      Tcl integration
    • 1
      Portable A database on my USB 'love it'

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    Cons of HSQLDB
    Cons of SQLite
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      • 2
        Not for multi-process of multithreaded apps
      • 1
        Needs different binaries for each platform

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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is HSQLDB?

      It offers a small, fast multi-threaded and transactional database engine with in-memory and disk-based tables and supports embedded and server modes. It includes a powerful command line SQL tool and simple GUI query tools.

      What is SQLite?

      SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

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      What companies use HSQLDB?
      What companies use SQLite?
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      What tools integrate with HSQLDB?
      What tools integrate with SQLite?

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      What are some alternatives to HSQLDB and SQLite?
      MySQL
      The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
      PostgreSQL
      PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.
      Firebird
      Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981.
      Oracle
      Oracle Database is an RDBMS. An RDBMS that implements object-oriented features such as user-defined types, inheritance, and polymorphism is called an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). Oracle Database has extended the relational model to an object-relational model, making it possible to store complex business models in a relational database.
      Redis
      Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
      See all alternatives