SQLite as an RDF store

How and why should SQLite be used as an RDF store.

Why SQLite?

SQLite is a emebedable database library written in C. It can be easily integrated in applications and is probably the most widely used database.

Longlevity

Besides being performant, widely-available and easy to use SQLite has a stable file format and is planned to be supported for a long time. This makes SQLite attractive for systems and software that should be runnable in 100 years or reproducible research.

Additional Indexes

SQLite also supports full-text search and geospatial queries.

Existing work

RDFLib-SQLite

A (mothballed) plugin for RDFlib. The replacement plugin is RDFLib-SQLAlchemy - which is also in maintenance mode.

An interesting optimization is that rdf:type statements are put in a separate table. This allows specialized indices for rdf:type statements, which are very common.