Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Are Windows and macOS supported?

Not at the moment, because under the hood Dqlite uses the Linux-specific io_submit asynchronous file system write API. That code leaves behind an interface that could be adapted to OSX and Windows though. See also this issue.

Is there 24/7 support available?

Not at the moment. But Canonical, the company who’s funding Dqlite, can arrange a support contract if desired.

Is there a commitment to long term releases?

The v1 series will be maintained, improved and bug-fixed for the foreseeable future and backward compatibility is guaranteed.

How does Dqlite behave during conflict situations?

Does Raft select a winning WAL to write and any others in-flight writes are aborted?

There can’t be a conflict situation. Raft’s model is that only the leader can append new log entries, which translated to Dqlite means that only the leader can write new WAL frames. So this means that any attempt to perform a write transaction on a non-leader node will fail with an ErrNotLeader error (and in this case clients are supposed to retry against whoever is the new leader).

When not enough nodes are available, are writes hung until consensus?

Yes, however, there’s a (configurable) timeout. This is a consequence of Raft sitting in the CP spectrum of the CAP theorem: in case of a network partition, it chooses consistency and sacrifices availability.

How does Dqlite compare to rqlite?

The main differences from rqlite are:

  • Can be embedded in any language that can inter-operate with C
  • Full support for transactions
  • No need for statements to be deterministic (e.g. you can use time() )
  • Frame-based replication instead of statement-based replication

See the Comparing Litestream, rqlite, and Dqlite blog post for a comparison of different SQLite replication implementations.

Why C?

The first prototype implementation of Dqlite was in Go, leveraging the hashicorp/raft implementation of the Raft algorithm. The project was later rewritten entirely in C because of performance problems due to the way Go inter-operates with C: Go considers a function call into C that lasts more than ~20 microseconds as a blocking system call, in that case, it will put the goroutine running that C call in waiting queue and resuming it will effectively cause a context switch, degrading performance (since there were a lot of them happening). See also this issue in the Go bug tracker.

The added benefit of the rewrite in C is that it’s now easy to embed Dqlite into project written in effectively any language since all major languages have provisions to create C bindings.

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