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If your program is load 100gb of data, query, then destroy the db... you don't care if a crash loses data. You just run again.

I'm not sure synchronous=off qualifies as incredibly dangerous. You can corrupt the database with synchronous=off, but only if you loss power or take an OS reboot in the middle of a transaction. Even with synchronous=off, transactions are still ACID and the database is guaranteed to be intact following an application crash. It takes an OS crash or power failure to cause problems.

Disabling synchronous is dangerous and I don't know where it could be used practically (if you care about your data https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html#_failure_to_sync).

That being said 'journal_mode=wal' is a bit faster than normal async but nowhere even close to the speed of disabling async completely.

> ... don't know where it could be used practically.

Maybe with read only databases?

Would you get a speed increase in reads? I thought async and wal speedup would just be for writes (no good for read only database). Maybe I'm misinformed. Have to play with it and see.

Hmmm, I'm not sure either. If you got around to testing it, it'd be interesting to hear about. :)