Enter lightweight databases like SQLite. As the home page says, it’s a self-contained, zero-configuration, transactional database engine. It’s great for rapid development, but many find that it’s a perfectly suitable solution for production as well, saving the user the overhead of a more complex solution like MySQL.

While playing around a bit with SQLite this weekend, I discovered a handy tool that makes SQLite a breeze to work with. It’s by Mrinal Kant and it’s a nice little Firefox plugin that allows you to manage SQLite DBs much the same way one might use phpMyAdmin for MySQL databases.

So go forth developers, and create and manage thy lightweight tables for great justice.

While there, I had the chance to hear from Adrian Cockroft, who is currently leading a performance tuning and research group over at Netflix.

Though his presentation was excellent, one of the most interesting thoughts he had was about the future of the hard drive, which he amusingly called spinning platters of rust.

Though projecting prices for storage is never a particularly exact science, some people have tried and show some interesting projections:

Given that we’ve already seem some major storage vendors moving toward solid-state arrays one has to wonder what effect this will have on operating system architecture. Cockroft pointed out that once we see effectively flat memory architectures in machines with much smaller differences in seek times between media, we may see a major effort underway to re-architect the way that operating systems see the idea of hierarchical memory.

Perhaps even more compelling from a performance standpoint is what this re-architecture might do to the idea of the database as a storage engine. For the truly curious, both Microsoft Research and Oracle Research are actively considering the question.