SQLite

One of the new features of PHP5 is the new SQL engine, SQLite. What makes SQLite so special is that you don’t need to have any server installed like MySQL or PostgreSQL. All you need is PHP and the SQLite library enabled!

With SQLite, all you need is a binary file which will be created by SQLite engine automatically once you try to open a connection with a non-existing DB (i.e the binary file). This makes SQLite Databases very easy to backup and restore since you are dealing with a normal file. Now you might think that DB are easy to exploit via URLs and you are right in that! if you create the DB in the public directory and someone found out about its location, he can exploit it and even download it!

But there is a solution for that and that is by creating the DB in the root directory in the same level where the public directory exists. (e.g. /home/usr/ instead of /home/usr/public_html/)

SQLite support most of the SQL92 features which makes it just wonderful. And that’s not all! SQLite library is under the public domain license which means that you can use it, source or binary, in any project you have!

more about this engine can be found in:

Official website: http://www.sqlite.org

PHP library: http://www.php.net/sqlite