Using SQLite

Source Distributions

Most open source projects provide a single download that allows you to configure, build, and install the software with just a handful of commands. SQLite works a bit differently. Because the most common way to use SQLite is to integrate the core source directly into a host application, the source distributions are designed to make integration as simple as possible. Most of the source distributions contain only source code and provide minimal (if any) configuration or build support files. This makes it simpler to integrate SQLite into a host application, but if you want to build a library or sqlite3 application, you will often need to do that by hand. As we’ll see, that’s fairly easy.

The Amalgamation

The official code distribution is known as the amalgamation. The amalgamation is a single C source file that contains the entire SQLite core. It is created by assembling the individual development files into a single C source file that is almost 4 megabytes in size and over 100,000 lines long. The amalgamation, along with its corresponding header file, is all that is needed to integrate SQLite into your application.

The amalgamation has two main advantages. First, with everything in one file, it is extremely easy to integrate SQLite into a host application. Many projects simply copy the amalgamation files into their own source directories. It is also possible to compile the SQLite core into a library and simply link the library into your application.

Second, the amalgamation ...