SQLite

SQLite is the default database for the OSS edition. It needs no external dependencies.

Editions

Talos ships two SQLite drivers with different runtime behavior:

• OSS — single-tenant. The driver pins the connection pool to a single connection and sets only foreign_keys=ON (no WAL, no busy_timeout). One connection serializes every query. Use it for development, prototypes, and low-traffic single-node deployments.
• Commercial — multi-tenant, with data isolated per tenant network. The driver enables WAL (journal_mode=WAL, synchronous=NORMAL, busy_timeout=10s) so reads run concurrently with a writer, and uses a pool of 10 connections. Every transaction starts with BEGIN IMMEDIATE (_txlock=immediate), which takes the write lock up front to avoid deadlocks between concurrent transactions. Reads gain concurrency, but SQLite's single-writer lock still serializes writes.

Both editions accept either the sqlite:// or sqlite3:// DSN scheme and share the same OSS migrations (commercial SQLite has no separate migration set).

Configuration

The path after sqlite:// is a raw filesystem path. The example below uses /var/lib/talos/data.db, but any writable location works.

db:
  dsn: "sqlite:///var/lib/talos/data.db"

Migrations

talos migrate up --database "sqlite:///var/lib/talos/data.db"

Limitations

These limits describe the OSS edition. The commercial driver adds concurrent reads through WAL but keeps SQLite's single-writer lock and stays single-node.

• Single-node only. No multi-instance deployments.
• The OSS driver processes queries sequentially through one connection, with no parallel reads or writes.
• Disk I/O limits write throughput.
• Not suitable for split admin and self-service deployments unless the surfaces share the same node and database file.

For multi-tenant workloads or sustained concurrent traffic, use the commercial edition.