Safety of journal_mode=off

[losfair]

mvSQLite does not need SQLite's journaling mechanism. Currently we emulate an in-memory journal to make applications happy, but this is a waste of memory. We need to figure out a way to disable journaling, safely.

There is journal_mode=off, but SQLite's documentation states:

The OFF journaling mode disables the atomic commit and rollback capabilities of SQLite. The ROLLBACK command no longer works; it behaves in an undefined way.

So a questions is that... how undefined is ROLLBACK with journal_mode=off? If it just corrupts the "disk" image, it's fine. We listen on the SQLITE_FCNTL_COMMIT_PHASETWO fcntl callback so we know whether a transaction is really committed. However, if it also corrupts memory, that would be very bad.