Every side project I start, I ask myself if I need Postgres. The answer is almost always no.

SQLite gives me:

• A single file I can back up by copying
• Zero ops
• More than enough performance for a side project

The caveat is concurrency. Once you have background jobs writing at the same time as requests, you need to think about WAL mode and busy timeouts. That's a 20-minute fix, not a reason to run a database server.

My current side project is Rails + SQLite, and the whole thing deploys as one container with a mounted volume.

I'm slowly reading about SQLite internals — the page format is a lot more approachable than I expected.