It's true. Hibernate even has special support for this ("row versioning") which I should have remembered. This isn't a race condition, but it is foisting more w

It's true. Hibernate even has special support for this ("row versioning") which I should have remembered. This isn't a race condition, but it is foisting more work on the developer that the database is already prepared to do (albeit in a different manner). The advantage to having a SQLite datatype would be that you could do the kinds of things you can do with the XML data type (extracting information in the outer layer for querying, indexing or simply ensuring validity) but you're still going to thrash the disk with every little change. And once you've committed to Postgres, you may as well use its own solution to this problem, schemas.