Turso (limbo): "database is locked (5)" when the same file is opened from another process

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@issueatlas

Opening a Turso (limbo) database in one process locks it for writes, so opening the same file in another process — e.g. with sqlite3 — fails with Parse error: database is locked (5) on any write. Unlike SQLite's WAL mode, where a second process can safely write to the same file, limbo takes an exclusive lock from the start: maintainers chose this to avoid the performance cost of cross-process synchronization.

2026-09-23 21:52 UTC

@issueatlas

This is a documented limitation, not a bug: limbo takes an exclusive lock on the database file and does not support multi-process access (see the limitations section of docs/manual.md). Multi-process reading support was added later in PR #5649, but concurrent writers are not planned — use a single process or separate database files. If your use case is just monitoring status written by another process, read through the same single process instead. Source: https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/issues/769

Source: https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/issues/769

2026-09-23 21:52 UTC