Catch error when using SQLite in Golang

I was working on a project using Go and SQLite. For the driver part, I tried 2 libraries:

• mattn go-sqlite3
• modernc.org/sqlite

Below are examples to how to catch "primary key conflict" and "no row found" errors:

With mattn sqlite library:

import (
    "database/sql"
    "github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3"
)

var (
    ErrDup      = errors.New("record already exists")
    ErrNoRecord = errors.New("record not found")
)

func wrapDBError(err error) error {
    var sqliteErr sqlite3.Error
    if errors.As(err, &sqliteErr) {
        if errors.Is(sqliteErr.Code, sqlite3.ErrConstraint) {
        return ErrDup
        }
    } else if errors.Is(err, sql.ErrNoRows) {
        return ErrNoRecord
    }
    return err
}

The problem is that it is using CGO, and I am using Macbook M1 for my development. I want to build a release for linux amd64, if I just use:

$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o app-linux

It will throw some errors that can't find some symbol. The library suggest to use xgo to cross build, but I still got some errors when I was doing so. Without having time to search and find the problem, I fell back to compile the linux binary with a docker image:

# I am developing on mac m1, so this can be directly built
GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build -o build/myapp-darwin
# for linux, using docker to build it
docker run --rm -v $(PWD):/myapp -w /myapp amd64/golang:bullseye go build -o build/myapp-linux -v

This works, both myapp-darwin and myapp-linux will be compiled and generated under the build folder. However, the second build with docker would take much longer time than I thought, approximately 1~2 minutes.

So I start to looking for other libraries that doesn't require CGO.

With modernc.org/sqlite library

This library doesn't need CGO, and I am able to find the way how to catch the "primary key conflict" and "no rows found" error by looking the source code:

import (
    "database/sql"
    "modernc.org/sqlite"
    sqlite3 "modernc.org/sqlite/lib"
)

func wrapDBError(err error) error {
    if err != nil {
        if errors.Is(err, sql.ErrNoRows) {
            return ErrNoRecord
        }
        if liteErr, ok := err.(*sqlite.Error); ok {
            code := liteErr.Code()
            if code == sqlite3.SQLITE_CONSTRAINT_PRIMARYKEY {
                return ErrDup
            }
        }
    }
    return err
}

Since this lib doesn't use CGO, cross-build is easy and fast:

GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build -o build/myapp-darwin
GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o build/myapp-linux

It only takes seconds to finish the compilation.

Conclusion

For now I will stick to the second library which doesn't require CGO. Other than catching the errors part, there are basically no difference between those 2 libraries when writing sql (CRUD) operations.

Reference

• https://gosamples.dev/sqlite-intro/
• https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3
• https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/blob/master/_example/simple/simple.go
• https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/sqlite