Vol. I  ·  No. 643Tuesday, October 6, 2026
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Research

Models / Research

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL Bug with TLA+MODELS Desk · Set in type · No Photograph
Models / Research · 03 July 2026

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL Bug with TLA+

SQLite recently patched a rare, 16-year-old bug in its Write-Ahead Log (WAL) checkpointing system that could lead to database corruption. This post from Canonical's dqlite (distributed SQLite) team walks through how they used TLA+ to formally model SQLite's internal behavior, isolate the exact sequence of steps needed to trigger the corruption, and determine whether their own system was vulnerable.

2 min. read