I agree that that is what is happening, but I don't think that's what's supposed to happen. My understanding was that transactions are distinct to an individual process. Also, note that even with the DELETE running in an explicit transaction, the same thing happens. Looking at the documentation https://www.sqlite.org/lang_transaction.html I see the following: > SQLite supports multiple simultaneous read transactions coming from separate database connections, possibly in separate threads or processes, but only one simultaneous write transaction.