without-durability-sqlite

without-durability's two interfaces over one SQLite file. No server, and no third-party dependency: the driver is in the standard library.

from without_durability_sqlite import SqliteCheckpointer, SqliteDurable, SqliteScheduler, connect, migrate

database = connect("workflows.db")
await migrate(database)
durable = SqliteDurable(SqliteCheckpointer(database), SqliteScheduler(database))
...
await database.aclose()

It is the smallest thing that still meets every requirement the interface states, which is the clearest way to say what the interface is for: a durable workflow does not need a cluster, a database server, or a dependency.

Two questions the other stores have to answer carefully settle themselves here. There is one writer at a time by construction, so BEGIN IMMEDIATE takes the write lock for the whole transaction and the fence check and the write it guards cannot be interleaved: Postgres needs FOR UPDATE on the claim row to get that and Redis needs a Lua script, while here the transaction is the exclusion. And there is nothing to co-locate, because the datastore is a file, so transact and arrive reach every table an application keeps in it. That last one is the same guarantee DBOS gets from Postgres, for an application that never needed Postgres.

What it costs is the shape of the whole thing: one machine. Every process sharing this store shares a filesystem, so the exclusion holds across the processes on one box and not across a fleet. That is the deployment this is for rather than a defect to apologise for: a CLI that resumes, a desktop app, an agent on a laptop, a single node that would rather not run Postgres to remember what it was doing.

See the without-durability-sqlite guide (with the API reference) for the statements, why connect pays the fsync that the usual WAL advice trades away, why an effect here is a synchronous callback where the Postgres store's is async, how the blocking driver is kept off the event loop, and why closing goes through aclose rather than the connection.