WAL is quite exciting indeed. And most of the items listed as disadvantages of WAL [1] are probably non-issues for most people; except maybe: > 5. It is not po

WAL is quite exciting indeed. And most of the items listed as disadvantages of WAL [1] are probably non-issues for most people; except maybe: > 5. It is not possible to open read-only WAL databases. The opening process must have write privileges for "-shm" wal-index shared memory file associated with the database, if that file exists, or else write access on the directory containing the database file if the "-shm" file does not exist. > 7. There is an additional quasi-persistent "-wal" file and "-shm" shared memory file associated with each database, which can make SQLite less appealing for use as an application file-format. And in Backwards Compatibility [1]: > To prevent older versions of SQLite from trying to recover a WAL-mode database (and making matters worse) the database file format version numbers (bytes 18 and 19 in the database header) are increased from 1 to 2 in WAL mode. Thus, if an older version of SQLite attempts to connect to an SQLite database that is operating in WAL mode, it will report an error along the lines of "file is encrypted or is not a database". [1] http://www.sqlite.org/wal.html http://www.sqlite.org/wal.html