Getting started with SQLite

What is SQLite?

SQLite is a relational database. It is the most used database application in the world, and one of the most used software packages overall - e.g. it’s on every Android phone, most browsers use it to store data locally, and fits on small embedded devices.

To work with SQLite in class, you need to complete the following steps ¹.

Download and install SQLite

Go to the download link and follow the instructions below for your operating system - MacOS, Windows or Linux. Note that the download contains the program sqlite3 as well as a couple of utilities.

Mac

SQLite comes with MacOS from version 10.4 - perhaps you already have it: open a terminal program and type sqlite3 at the prompt. If you see this, you already have SQLite:

SQLite version 3.13.0 2016-05-18 10:57:30
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
Connected to a transient in-memory database.
Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database.
sqlite> 

You can now leave SQLite again by typing .quit at the prompt and pressing Enter.

If you don’t have it, you must download the Precompiled Binaries for Mac OS X (x86) (ZIP file, 1.34 MB) from this site. Then open a terminal (a command line program - it’s called terminalon the Mac) and enter:

unzip sqlite-tools-osx-x86-3320200.zip

You don’t need to know anything than how to open the terminal, but if you’re curious about this CLI, or Command Line Interface, to your Mac, see here.

Windows

Here is a video (10 min) explaining how to do this in detail. Or you can just follow these brief instructions:

• For Windows, there are three files for choice. Download the last one called sqlite-tools-win32-x86-3300100.zip (ZIP file, 1.75 MB).

Image: file to download for Windows10

• Create a folder in your C directory called sqlite.
• Move the ZIP file to this folder.
• In C:\sqlite, unzip the file you just downloaded. Your C:\sqlitefolder should now contain the following files:

sqldiff.exe
sqlite3.exe
sqlite3_analyzer.exe

• Click on the file sqlite3.exe (that’s the command line shell) to open the program. A terminal should open.
• At the prompt, enter .quit to leave the program.

Linux

For Linux, install SQLite from the command line (terminal) using your distro’s pacakage manager. E.g. under Ubuntu, I use:

sudo apt install sqlite3

Any problems?

Let me know if there are any issues with your installation - perhaps I can help!

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1. By the way, this HTML file was composed in RStudio, an IDE for R, using [R Markdown](https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/. Time permitting, you will encounter it again when we talk about data science later in the term.↩︎