Maximum number of rows in a sqlite table
Give an simple sqlite3 table (create table data (key PRIMARY KEY,value)) with key size of 256 bytes and value size of 4096 bytes, what is the limit (ignoring disk space limits) on the maximum number of rows in this sqlite3 table? Are their limits associated with OS (win32, linux or Mac)
Answer
As of Jan 2017 the sqlite3 limits page defines the practical limits to this question based on the maximum size of the database which is 140 terabytes:
Maximum Number Of Rows In A Table
The theoretical maximum number of rows in a table is 2^64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19). This limit is unreachable since the maximum database size of 140 terabytes will be reached first. A 140 terabytes database can hold no more than approximately 1e+13 rows, and then only if there are no indices and if each row contains very little data.
So with a max database size of 140 terabytes you'd be lucky to get ~1 Trillion rows since if you actually had a useful table with data in it the number of rows would be constrained by the size of the data. You could probably have up to 10s of billions of rows in a 140 TB database.