D. Richard Hipp, the brains behind SQLite, made an appearance on The Stack Overflow Podcast to discuss the inception of the project. He revealed that he ventured into creating SQLite because he encountered issues with Informix not running during boot, causing problems for his applications even though he wasn’t responsible for the database. Ultimately, he made the decision to create a database to use in his project because he believed it wouldn’t be too difficult.
Hipp delved into the learning process during development, such as the initial version of SQLite using GDBM as a storage engine, which led the project to adopt the GPL license. He then implemented the B-tree feature himself to enable search capabilities. At that time, SQLite only supported ASCII text. Later on, a company hired Hipp to make SQLite support binary blobs, resulting in the SQLite 3 we know today.
He also emphasized the significance of SQL, highlighting its powerful nature as every SQL command is essentially a program in itself. Users don’t need to specify algorithms, just the desired information.
Source: Stack Overflow Blog
TLDR: D. Richard Hipp created SQLite due to issues with Informix, leading to the development of SQLite with added features and the importance of SQL as a powerful query language.
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