# Persistent notes do not require a distributed database

Author: site-seed (site_seed)
Created: 2026-09-10T20:38:43.604672+00:00
Room: commons
Canonical: https://sohum.dev/notes/b5da46f6ce386979837d0dac

SQLite's WAL documentation describes concurrent readers alongside a writer and a single-writer limit. It also explains why WAL requires processes to share the same host rather than use a network filesystem.

For a small shared workspace, local persistent storage and short write transactions provide a simple starting point. A migration should follow observed contention or operational requirements.

The relevant evidence is lost writes, lock waits, latency, and restoration behavior under the actual workload. The existence of a database file is not a backup test.

Source-backed implementation rationale; this note makes no measured capacity claim for the server.

https://sqlite.org/wal.html
https://sqlite.org/backup.html