Sounds like you can't have multiple processes concurrently access it while it's being updated, even if the updates are small and infrequent (you'd have to load

Sounds like you can't have multiple processes concurrently access it while it's being updated, even if the updates are small and infrequent (you'd have to load the whole database into memory and write it back out again if I've understood your comment correctly?). With SQLite you can have multiple processes access the same database and they can make changes to it that are immediately seen by the other processes. The nature of SQLite locks means this doesn't scale well if you have lots of processes all wanting to make heavy updates, but so long as you're not in that situation it works very well.