Typically, yes. In this case fly.io (and others) are trying to change that by doing interesting things with storage of the database and the transaction logs. I

Typically, yes. In this case fly.io (and others) are trying to change that by doing interesting things with storage of the database and the transaction logs. It works by hooking into various SQLite features (like virtual file systems and post transaction hooks) so your application doesn’t need to care about that layer and you just write you app with standard SQLite code. The theory is you get best of both worlds - it could be pretty cool if it works out well.