I saw that SQLite is supported, but also heavily reccomended against.
How viable would it be for a small instance that serves 3-4 people tops?
I’m no expert on databases so I don’t know the different limitations.
I’ve been using SQLite for a small team of more than 4 people (all volunteers, so far from full-time and heavy usage). Also, most of them don’t really do much. I would say that there are 2 main users and 2 medium users and the remaining users rarely use it.
But I don’t know how your potential users are going to use seafile and how this affects the database so I don’t know whether an answer can be given based solely on the number of users.
SQLite is actually a very competent piece of software. I’ve run both SQLite and MySQL Seafile servers and SQLite performs very well. No problems encountered.
That said, somewhere in the ancient past, I believe Development suggested that it not be used for more than 24 users. Depending on activity you might adjust that figure. Your actual mileage may vary.
In accordance with @squirrel I would say that you should have no complaints. Why do you say that it is “heavily recommended against?”
I got that from here:
manual.seafile. com/deploy/
Has a line now that explicitly says
Deploying Seafile with SQLite note, deploy Seafile with SQLite is no longer recommended
But if 24 is generally where it’s being said not to, yeah, I’d be waaaay below that with 3-4 maybe only 1 really active.
That “24” should not be considered gospel. If it’s true at all it goes back quite a number of years. But, yes, the notion was that SQLite was fine for small (and not very busy) workgroups and 3-4 users is small by anyone’s standard.
I hadn’t seen that comment in the Manual regarding SQLite until now but there are several reasons that it might not be recommended besides reliability and performance.
One issue that I would consider important in planning a system is whether Development is planning to drop it from some future release. Personally I would rather build a MySQL server now and avoid the migration from SQLite in a year or two if I knew that a future release would no longer support it.
Maybe we can get a quick statement from @Jonathan on the official outlook for SQLite in Seafile.
SQLite will be supported for the long term. It’s not recommended for enterprise environments, where MySQL/MariaDB is recommended. For small deployments it’s okay.