The Story of Dwayne Richard Hipp and the Development of SQLite in 1999

General Dynamics (GD) is the sixth-largest defense corporation in the world. Obviously, it's an American company. To realise how important GD is, we have to know that they were the original developers of F-16 Falcon, arguably the most lethal fighter jet engineered by mankind, and then sold that division to Lockheed Martin. However, GD is more involved and more prolific in land and marine weapons, especially guided missile systems on battleships.

In Navy terms, a Destroyer is a fast and maneuvrable battleship used to escort larger battleships and defend them from attackers. In order to defend, they have a variety of guided missile systems to launch against enemy aircraft, submarines, even land targets. We go back to 1999, on one such Destroyer in the US Navy, where GD is trying to solve a seemingly intractable computer problem. Their man responsible for managing computer systems on that battleship is a 38-year-old experienced programmer named Dwayne Richard Hipp.

The problem was deceptively simple. Every system having a computer - be it a laptop, a car, a refrigerator, a factory machine, or a guided missile - needs to store data. This data is almost always stored in the form of tables linked with each other, called a database. We can talk to a database using a special language called SQL. So, if you want to read or write data, you submit SQL commands to the database through your program. For example, if I deposit money in a bank, the cashier makes entries into the bank program, which sends the account number and amount to the bank's database using SQL and the balance is updated. The US Navy at that time was using Informix database developed by the mighty IBM. Although Informix was a great database for normal usage, it had two problems.

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