Is it possible to open a locked sqlite database in read only mode?

Question

I\'d like to open the chromium site data (in ~/.config/chromium/Default) with python-sqlite3 but it gets locked whenever chromium is running, which is understandable since trans

Answer 1

Chromium is holding a database lock for long periods of time? Yuck! That's really not a very good idea at all. Still, not your fault…

You could try just copying the database file (e.g., with the system utility cp) and using that snapshot for reading purposes; SQLite keeps all its committed state in a single file per database. Yes, there's a chance of seeing a partial transaction, but you will definitely not have lock problems on Unix as SQLite definitely doesn't use mandatory locks. (This might well not work on Windows due to the different locking scheme there.)