I can think of plenty of services that an occasional (once a year? less?) outage is okay. Heck, anything relying on AWS us-east-1 is going to have outages that frequently based on the last few months. Meanwhile, almost any service is better off when its response times are cut drastically. I’ve seen many instances where a service’s response times are more than half waiting for a db to respond.
It's not the threat of an outage with data loss that is concerning to me- I just want to understand use case that needs fractions of a second shaved off of query times by using SQLite in this way that is also ok with the possibility of data loss.
Interactive interfaces. There's a huge difference between moving a slider and seeing the reaction in real time and moving the slider and seeing the reaction a second later. If you define "real time" as 30 fps, you have 33ms to process each query and show the result. That could involve multiple database queries with computation in between, if your business logic isn't easily expressible in SQL.
Come to think about it, that covers most apps with UI. Apps where you are exploring data are definitely more impacted however.
I'd rather have a service that is down one day per year, rather than death by thousand papercuts of a slow UI every day.
Imagine some frustratingly slow app like Jira for example, i would be much happier with a snappy UI there, where one could theoretically still work for a downtime of week or more without updating your task status.
If we are talking about shaving the last milliseconds, it could be something very interactive like autocompletion. Which is something with a graceful fallback of typing in the whole thing manually.
If my webpage loading makes ten database calls, and each database call takes 45 milliseconds, my webpages takes 300 milliseconds longer to load than if each call only took 15 milliseconds. 0.3 seconds across each page load, especially if the rest of the call is less than a second, can significantly improve the usability of a website and increase user retention. This applies for any user facing website whether its a social media platform, an online shop, or just a blog.
Obviously there are other improvements that can be made too, like batching db requests or in-memory caching, but this is one option.
