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SQLite's quality is due to the DO-178B compliance that has been achieved with "test harness 3" (TH3).

Dr. Hipp's efforts to perfect TH3 likely did lower his happiness, but all the Android users stopped reporting bugs.

"The 100% MCD tests, that’s called TH3. That’s proprietary. I had the idea that we would sell those tests to avionics manufacturers and make money that way. We’ve sold exactly zero copies of that so that didn’t really work out... We crashed Oracle, including commercial versions of Oracle. We crashed DB2. Anything we could get our hands on, we tried it and we managed to crash it... I was just getting so tired of this because with this sort of thing, it’s the old joke of, you get 95% of the functionality with the first 95% of your budget, and the last 5% on the second 95% of your budget. It’s kind of the same thing. It’s pretty easy to get up to 90 or 95% test coverage. Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/



Even more interesting is right above that:

> he managed to segfault every single database engine he tried, including SQLite, except for Postgres. Postgres always ran and gave the correct answer. We were never able to find a fault in that. The Postgres people tell me that we just weren’t trying hard enough.


I will confess that it is easier to quote the rule than the exception.

That is a profound compliment for Postgres.


I've always felt like Postgres is like one of those big old Detroit Diesel V12s that power generators and mining trucks and things. It's slow and loud and hopelessly thirsty compared to the modern stuff you get nowadays, and it'll continue to be just as slow and loud and hopelessly thirsty for another 40 or 50 years without stopping even once if you don't fiddle with it.


And then you find out that the slowness was because it was placed in first gear and someone left a limiter on the throttle...


(I should say that it is not at all difficult to crash an Oracle dedicated server process. I've seen quite a few. This doesn't crash the database (usually).

I've never run an instance in MTS mode, so I've never seen a shared server crash, although I think it would be far from difficult.

I might be curious about the type of Db2 that crashed, UDB, mainframe, or OS/400, as they are very different.)




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