I Replaced SQLite with a Rust Database in My AI Robot — Here's What Happened

I used SQLite for everything. For years, it was my default answer to "where do I stuff." Config files, sensor logs, user data, even model outputs - SQLite handled it. When I started building an AI-powered robot that needed on-device memory, the choice felt obvious: embed SQLite, done. Three weeks later, the robot's memory was a mess of incompatible schemas, I was writing custom serialization code for every data type, and I'd accumulated roughly 400 lines of glue code just to and retrieve things that weren't text or numbers. Image embeddings. Audio fingerprints. Sensor state vectors.