How to corrupt SQLite — the guide you actually want

SQLite has a how-to-corrupt page that's gone viral for a good reason. It's not a marketing post. It's a checklist written by the people who maintain the engine, and it's practical — the kind of thing you bookmark and come back to when your database starts acting funny.

The page covers the gotchas that bite people: WAL mode and journal files, concurrent access, the difference between page corruption and logical corruption, and the tools you use to check — PRAGMA integritycheck, PRAGMA journalmode, and the dump-and-reload trick. It's not long. It's dense. You can read it in five minutes and save yourself five hours of debugging.

The kind of resource you don't know you needed until something breaks at 2am.

Why this matters for us: if your app's database is corrupting and you don't know why, this is the first place to look — no consultants required.