I/O error starting atomic write

Category: I/O ErrorVersions: 3.25.0+

🔴 Production Risk Error

Medium — transaction will not proceed; switch to WAL mode.

What this means

SQLITE_IOERR_BEGIN_ATOMIC (7434) is returned when the VFS cannot begin an atomic write operation. Used by VFS implementations that support atomic batch-atomic writes (e.g., F2FS).

Why it happens

1Filesystem does not support the atomic write batch operation.
2VFS error starting an atomic write sequence.

How to reproduce

Atomic write mode on filesystems with atomic write support (F2FS, NVM).

trigger — this will ERROR

# Atomic write mode requires special VFS/filesystem support
# SQLITE_IOERR_BEGIN_ATOMIC indicates the begin step failed

sqlite3.DatabaseError: disk I/O error

Fix 1

Why this works

Fall back to standard journal or WAL mode if atomic writes are not supported.

Fix 2

Why this works

Ensure the filesystem supports the atomic write VFS extension.

Version notes

Sources

📚 Official docs: https://www.sqlite.org/rescode.html#ioerr_begin_atomic

🔧 Source ref: sqlite3.h — SQLITE_IOERR_BEGIN_ATOMIC = 7434

📖 Further reading: Atomic write VFS

Confidence assessment

⚠️ MEDIUM confidence

Stable. Only relevant with atomic-write VFS.