>> application crash on a working file-system should not cause you to lose any data already committed > > That is not true, Dan. > > There is absolutely no way that one can be "certain" that an application write to persistent storage occurred at all UNLESS the application terminated cleanly OR the application told the Operating System and File System to "make it so" from time to time. What kind of system are we talking about? Once COMMIT has been executed, SQLite has transferred all the data to buffers managed by the OS - by calling write() or equivalent. So that the data is available to other file-system users. Are there systems that will discard these buffers if the application crashes instead of terminating cleanly? Of course if the power fails or OS crashes before the OS buffers are actually flushed to disk you lose data, but what has that got to do with the application exiting cleanly?