SQLite Can Do More Than You Think — Full-Text Search, JSON, Window Functions, and 281TB Databases

SQLite ships with every Python, every iPhone, every Android, every Mac, and every Linux distro. Yet most developers reach for PostgreSQL or MySQL by default. Here are 5 things SQLite does that might surprise you. 1. Full-Text Search (Built-In) -- Create a full-text search table CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE articles USING fts5 ( title , body ); -- Insert data INSERT INTO articles VALUES ( 'Web Scraping Guide' , 'Learn how to scrape websites using Python...' ); INSERT INTO articles VALUES ( 'API Tutorial' , 'Build REST APIs with FastAPI and Python...' ); -- Search with ranking SELECT title , rank FROM articles WHERE articles MATCH 'python scraping' ORDER BY rank ; No Elasticsearch. No Algolia. No external service. Full-text search with ranking, snippets, and boolean operators — built into a 1MB file. 2. JSON Support -- Store and query JSON directly CREATE TABLE events ( data JSON ); INSERT INTO events VALUES ( '{"user": "john", "action": "click", "page": "/pricing"}' ); -- Query nested JSON fiel