How we tracked down a 16-year-old SQLite bug

2026-08-13

Tailscale spent six months tracing repeated SQLite corruption to a rare 16-year-old race condition between WAL checkpointing and write transactions, triggered more often by its aggressive manual checkpointing. The investigation led to a SQLite fix, stronger recovery tooling, and a broader lesson that even “boring” technology becomes risky when operated outside its common paths.