Support setting a timeout for SQLite

Problem

SQLite queries fail immediately if the DB is locked.

I blindly tried passing arguments similarly to how the docs show for PostgreSQL, needless to say, it didn’t work.

datasource db {
  provider = "sqlite"
  url      = "file:../db.sqlite?timeout=5000"
}

[internalfx]

@pimeys thank you for taking the time to respond.

SQLite is not really meant for multi-user use cases. It’s much better if you just have one writer to the database.

Agreed. But let me preface our future discussion by saying I’m not just using SQLite for the fun of it. I’ve used it in the past and have studied it’s capabilities and limitations.

Every connection locks the whole thing while reading or writing, so you only want one of them to that database.

That is not entirely correct, SQLite can handle multiple readers quite well.

That error comes directly from the database. We really can’t do anything to it, if SQLite decides to error out while holding multiple connections into it.

I think you might be mistaken here. SQLite directly supports a “busy timeout”. See docs

Also the sqlite3 npm package supports the timeout as well. See docs

I can only assume that prisma could do something similar.

If you need more connections, I’d consider trying out PostgreSQL.

I work with small companies, usually developing in-house software to be used by at most 5-10 people. SQLite is more than capable of keeping up. And in “production” prisma is the only process that will be communicating with the DB in the vast majority of all cases.

However, if I need to do any maintenance of any kind. I can cause the DB to start throwing BUSY errors. It’s not a problem for the DB to just wait a few seconds. Hence, why I am trying to set a timeout.

The program having to wait is very acceptable in this case, but the busy errors are troublesome.

Is there any other way I can set the timeout?

[JedWatson]

I also thought it worth sharing that I’ve found this issue as well through a different path. I tried out Blitz on the weekend and spun up a demo project with SQLite and it was mostly a really good experience.

However the first thing I did was set up a database seed file per their guide here

And of course, I had a few dozen things to create to I wrapped them in an await Promise.all(...) statement, which would have tried to run multiple concurrent operations through the same Prisma Client (this is all in a single thread running on my dev machine)

And as soon as you get to about three things happening in parallel (specifically, create statements) the database throws with Operation timed out (SQLite database is busy)

I mention this mainly because it’s a weird/hard block to hit in the first experience, given I was following the documented “happy path” for both Prisma and Blitz.

I was able to work around the problem by rewriting my code to create entries in the database sequentially (using a for ... loop and async await db.thing.create() call in each iteration) but ideally either Prisma Client or the SQLite settings would sort this out for me.

cc/ @flybayer because it impacts Blitz getting started experience