Years of experience has taught developers that large client/server RDBMS platforms are powerful tools for safely storing, organizing, and manipulating data. Unfortunately, most large RDBMS products are resource-intensive and require a lot of upkeep. This boosts their performance and capacity, but it also limits how and where they can be practically deployed.

SQLite is designed to fill in those gaps, providing the same powerful and familiar tools for safely storing, organizing, and manipulating data in smaller, more resource constrained environments. SQLite is designed to complement, rather than replace, larger RDBMS platforms in situations where simplicity and ease of use are more important than capacity and concurrency.

This complimentary role enables applications and tools to embrace relational data management (and the years of experience that come with it), even if they’re running on smaller platforms without administrative oversight. Developers may laugh at the idea of installing MySQL on a desktop system (or mobile phone!) just to support an address book application, but with SQLite this not only becomes possible, it becomes entirely practical.