rqlite creator Philip O’Toole traces distributed SQLite since 2014 through three approaches: consensus, streaming recovery and merging. Consensus clusters such as rqlite target continuity through failures, Litestream provides inexpensive recovery for a single server, and CRDT approaches reconcile multiple writers afterward. None is universally superior. Even rqlite offers different read guarantees, including its default Weak mode and Linearizable reads, so consistency requirements and acceptable failure behavior should guide the choice.