Twelve Years of Distributed SQLite

In September 2014, the author released rqlite, an open-source system combining SQLite with Raft consensus protocol to enable distributed replication across clusters. This pioneering project created a new category that has since grown to include a dozen similar systems, with several receiving venture funding or acquisitions, though the distributed SQLite story is often misattributed to later projects like Litestream (2021) and dqlite (2017). The author reflects on twelve years of development and the evolution of this approach to solving the problem of reliable relational data storage in distributed systems.