:Hi @ishays,
Welcome to the 
community support forums !!
We are excited that you joined our OSS community. Please read about some of the FAQs in the community 
I talked to the Engineering folks and the short answer is that Grafana does need a Database.
Long answer:
Grafana needs a database. SQLite stores its DB on disk and thus can be stored in a PVC.
However, PVCs are per pod, so you can’t (generally) mount a PVC onto two instances. Then, there’s the fact that an SQLite database isn’t designed for concurrent writes, so even if you did, you’d get yourself into trouble.