Speed Up SQLite Database Copying: The Text Dump Trick
2025-05-01

The author encountered a speed bottleneck when copying large SQLite databases due to the large size of index files. They discovered that dumping the database as a text file (using the `.dump` command) and then compressing it with gzip significantly reduces file size, thereby speeding up the copy process. Compared to directly copying a 3.4GB database, this method compressed the file to 240MB, resulting in a 14x speed improvement. Additionally, this method avoids database corruption issues that can arise from updates during the copy process, improving reliability.
Development
database copying