As people have said, WAL mode will mostly do what you need. It will allow you to have a writer and most of the time as many readers as you want to access the database at the same time. It will NOT lock a give accessor as the writer, as was mentioned when the writer commits, it gives up its lock, so someone else can take it, and that someone can even start the request before the writer commits and busy wait for it to be available, so that level of locking would need to be done elsewhere. Also, there will be occasional periods when the writer will need exclusive control to fold the WAL file back into the database. If a reader holds is transaction forever, it can block this from happening, which will cause the WAL file to keep growing lowering efficiency in space and access time.