Have you tried to use SQLite as the query engine for your *raw* database?

Question

I have made a custom report generator for our database (Oracle Berkeley DB engine).
Now it's time for me to add more flexibility and I am in dilemma. Do a partial or a fundamental redesign?

1. Lets assume that I have plenty of time.
2. I can only read the database, I don't have the right to modify it.

Inspired from Query Anything with SQLite article, I would like to let SQLite engine to do the dirty work (grouping, filtering, etc).

Have you tried it? Any examples? What about performance issues?

Answer 1

It works fine for what I am using it :-) However I don't use it together with another database, just standalone. There's a list of Well-known Users of SQlite on their website.

You need to tell us more about your usecase to make any speculations about performance, but I'd rather make a POC and measure performance http://stackoverflow.com/questions/888224/what-is-your-longest-held-programming-assumption-that-turned-out-to-be-incorrect/888766#888766

There is a nice quickstart article on the sqlite site.

Here's the C/C++ API Reference.

I assume you should be able to create a temporary SQLite table by initially querying your other DB and inserting the data into the temporary SQLite table. Then you can use different querys on that temporary table to do your grouping, filtering, etc.