dirty little database secret
Recently I tweeted about one of my blog posts, and surprisingly saw a mini spike in traffic - when traffic is almost zero, any traffic is a spike. Regardless, when slapping together this blog, in many places I took the path of least resistance. With regards to database, that path was sqlite. I knew full well that it couldn't hold up against any real sort of traffic, but the idea of creating a database and users and yada yada yaaa was just not something that looked like a lot of fun at the time. So I've been running the site on sqlite.
Now back to that traffic spike - it got me thinking about using sqlite. Maybe not so much thinking as worrying. Nobody wants concurrency issues. Nobody really wants to switch database engines either. Both are unpleasant, but only one affords the opportunity to learn PostgreSQL. I could have gone with MySQL, which I have installed and know, but I've been on a bit of a learning kick (this site is the product of that).

I installed the macports Postgres on my mac to teach myself how to port the data from sqlite. Installing it that way was super easy. The hard parts were installing the python database library and actually using Django's manage.py to dump and reinstate the data. I won't go into my particular difficulties (unless somebody asks) but lets just say manage.py makes it much easier than it would be otherwise, but it still could go a ways towards making it easier. After all, I'm no DBA :) I think I may continue to use sqlite in dev, but I'm glad I got through the switch.
Overall, I've got a little Postgres experience now and I don't have to lay awake thinking about my database concurrency issues.