How can I serialize an in-memory SQLite Database?

Question

I have an in-memory SQLite database which I want to serialize and send to another computer. Is this possible without writing the database out to disk and reading the file from there?

Answer 1

You could use the online backup API to transfer the in-memory database, to a file-based database created in shared memory (for Linux, in /dev/shm for instance) avoiding the disk operations. Then this pseudo-file is transferred to the remote host (still put in /dev/shm), and the online load API is used to transfer from the file-based database, to your target in-memory database.

See:

http://www.sqlite.org/backup.html

http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/backup_finish.html

AFAIK, there is no API to perform online/load without intermediate databases.

Answer 2

The sqlite3 shell program contains a .dump command that "dumps the database in an SQL text format." You can use the source code for .dump (it is public domain) to create your own serializer.