Newer Than I Thought

I have a little server that I deploy my side projects to, and I occasionally get bitten by differences between that environment and my local machine. This is the price I pay for not using Docker. But I find it instructive, a good reminder of all the things that can be different.

The latest one surprised me. It was a simple sqlite query, something like select concat(foo, "bar", baz) from table; I do have a tab open to <sqlite.org> for documentation most of the time, but I didn’t bother looking anything up for this. I’ve been programming long enough to have an intuition for how things will work. Obviously any dialect of SQL is going to have a way to combine strings, and obviously it’s going to be called something like concat or concatenate. And indeed when I tested on my local computer it worked exactly as I expected.

So I run my code on the server and get a very unexpected no such function: concat. I was very confused. Though as far as bugs go this was not too hard to track down. Sqlite is my only dependency for this project, so an obvious first step was to check the versions. They were indeed different.

After a little more research I discovered that sqlite only added a concat function in version 3.44.0, in late 2023. That was my other surprise of the day, that it is such a recent addition. So if you’re on an earlier version than that you’ll have to use the string concatenation operator ||.