[groue]

What's cool with WAL mode is that SQLITE_BUSY won't happen for readers (except very rare scenarios: https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html#sometimes_queries_return_sql...)

One should only expect SQLITE_BUSY for writes (if a writer is already holding the lock, and the busy timeout expires before the other writer releases the lock). So yes, prefer short writes, or adjust your timeout. Generally speaking, SQLITE_BUSY can not be 100% prevented for writes.

[stavros]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. For most apps, it's fairly easy to keep writes short, so SQLite is a great fit.

[groue]

Yes. Now, many short writes look exactly as one very long write from the point of view of an enqueued write that is waiting for its turn :-) I don't quite remember how fair is SQLite scheduling, in practice.