operational error: database is locked

Question

So I know this problem is not new in flask, and people have already asked it before. However I am still facing a problem while executing my database commands in bash as I am new to python. This is what i did

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite.connect('/home/pjbardolia/mysite/tweet_count.db')
c = conn.cursor()

c.execute("create table count_twitter (count_id integer primary key autoincrement ,count_present integer not null,last_tweet not null)")

c.execute(insert into count_twitter values('',10,10))

however after executing insert statement I am getting operational error: database is locked. Can someone tellme in simple terms what does this error means? and how to solve it. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

This is what this error means:

SQLite is meant to be a lightweight database, and thus can't support a high level of concurrency. OperationalError: database is locked errors indicate that your application is experiencing more concurrency than sqlite can handle in default configuration. This error means that one thread or process has an exclusive lock on the database connection and another thread timed out waiting for the lock the be released.

Python's SQLite wrapper has a default timeout value that determines how long the second thread is allowed to wait on the lock before it times out and raises the OperationalError: database is locked error.

If you're getting this error, you can solve it by:

Switching to another database backend. At a certain point SQLite becomes too "lite" for real-world applications, and these sorts of concurrency errors indicate you've reached that point.

Rewriting your code to reduce concurrency and ensure that database transactions are short-lived.

Increase the default timeout value by setting the timeout database option.

Probably you have another connection in your code that is not closed or not committed and this cause this error. Basically trying to do second execute when it is already locked by the another one. If you really want to have your concurrent transactions you need to have a RDBMS.