SQLITE_NOMEMFATALTier 3 — Handle with care⚠️ MEDIUM confidencemalloc() failed — out of memory
🔴 Production Risk Error
Critical — SQLite cannot continue; close and reopen the connection.
What this means
SQLITE_NOMEM (7) is returned when a memory allocation inside SQLite fails. This typically means the process has exhausted its heap or the configured SQLite memory limit has been reached.
Why it happens
- 1System RAM exhausted.
- 2sqlite3_hard_heap_limit64() or sqlite3_soft_heap_limit64() set too low.
- 3Very large query result set loaded entirely into memory.
- 4Memory leak in application code consuming heap before SQLite can allocate.
How to reproduce
Any SQLite operation that needs to allocate memory — open, prepare, step, etc.
import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect(':memory:')
# Simulate by setting a very low memory limit via C API
# In Python, SQLITE_NOMEM surfaces as MemoryError or OperationalErrorFix 1
Why this works
Increase available system RAM or swap.
Fix 2
Why this works
Stream large result sets with fetchone() / fetchmany() instead of fetchall().
Fix 3
Why this works
Increase the sqlite3_soft_heap_limit64() if it was set too aggressively.
Fix 4
Why this works
Profile and fix memory leaks in the application.
What not to do
Why it's wrong:
Sources
📚 Official docs: https://www.sqlite.org/rescode.html#nomem
🔧 Source ref: sqlite3.h — SQLITE_NOMEM = 7
📖 Further reading: SQLite memory management
Confidence assessment
⚠️ MEDIUM confidence
Stable.
See also
📄 Reference pages