obelisk/docs/adr/0006-write-transaction-rollback-and-concurrency.md

Write-transaction rollback safety and SQLite concurrency

Context. The app surfaced Obelisk index build failed: cannot rollback - no transaction is active. That text was a secondary cleanup failure. SQLite had already ended the transaction, then the catch block's unguarded ROLLBACK threw over the primary exception and turned a skippable per-file failure into a whole-build failure. The masked exception was not preserved, so contention (SQLITE_BUSY / SQLITE_BUSY_SNAPSHOT) is the leading explanation rather than a proven historical fact. It is plausible because daemon builds, manual rebuilds, skill passive-pull indexing, heartbeat writes, and reads share one WAL database.

busy_timeout alone is not a correctness fix. In particular, SQLITE_BUSY_SNAPSHOT is not made safe by waiting longer, and retrying only the failed statement can replay part of a transaction.

Decision. Use one transaction primitive plus two explicit coordination layers.

• packages/core/src/tx.ts owns the binding-agnostic runWriteTransaction(db, work). Adapters expose transaction state from better-sqlite3's inTransaction and node:sqlite's isTransaction. The primitive performs BEGIN IMMEDIATE, runs work exactly once, commits, and attempts rollback only when the binding says a transaction is active or its state is unknown. Cleanup never masks the primary exception. Diagnostics record phase, SQLite code, rollback outcome, transaction state, label, and attempts.
• Retry is an upper-layer policy in packages/core/src/write-coordinator.ts, never hidden inside the transaction primitive. Only an idempotent whole transaction that failed during work/commit with SQLITE_BUSY* and is confirmed inactive may be retried. The default is three attempts within a one-second budget with short backoff. BEGIN contention is deferred to the build scheduler; an active or unknown post-error transaction aborts the build.
• Per-file failures remain warnings and are reported in skippedFiles; finalize failures propagate. affectedSessionIds is updated only after the relevant commit. Force cleanup is one atomic, retryable transaction, and finalize is likewise retried as a complete idempotent transaction.
• A fresh __app_heartbeat__ is policy ownership: while it is fresh, the skill opens no write connection and performs no migration, schema setup, checkpoint, index build, or attune. __app_last_successful_build__ remains an observability/freshness marker and is not required for ownership. The skill checks ownership again after acquiring the hard lease to close the TOCTOU window. Search/query connections are read-only.
• A dedicated .obelisk/writer.lock.sqlite provides the cross-process safety mutex on every platform. Acquisition is BEGIN IMMEDIATE with non-blocking or bounded waiting; release is idempotent. App builds and heartbeats, skill builds and attune, app schema/legacy migrations and memory mutations, and manual rebuild all participate. Manual rebuild's main process owns the lease across worker build, atomic target replacement, and database reopen; the worker uses the explicit caller-held mode.
• The app's in-process indexer service permits one build at a time. A lease deferral retains changed paths and schedules a short retry without announcing a successful build. Service start publishes the ownership heartbeat immediately, then refreshes it periodically.
• Index-writer and skill read connections use an explicit 250 ms SQLite busy timeout inside the larger bounded coordination budget. The long-lived app query connection retains a 5 s timeout; heartbeat is deliberately non-blocking (0 ms) so it never stalls the Electron main thread. Builds use BEGIN IMMEDIATE. Routine checkpointing is PASSIVE; blocking TRUNCATE is reserved for explicit maintenance.

Verification. Fast tests inject auto-rollback and BUSY failures to prove the primary error is preserved, retry replays the whole transaction, persistent per-file failure is skipped, force cleanup is atomic, and affected-session state is commit-aware. The Electron harness uses real Electron-ABI better-sqlite3 and two child processes: one holds the SQLite writer lease until signalled, while the other runs synchronous buildIndex. It verifies both release-within-budget success and bounded writer_busy deferral. Separate arbitration tests prove a heartbeat-only daemon marker keeps query and attune paths read-only.

Consequences. Heartbeat and lease have deliberately different jobs: the heartbeat decides who should write, while the lease guarantees writers cannot overlap when policy information races or is stale. A single bad transcript can still be skipped so the index self-heals on a later build; structural/finalize failures remain visible. Longer timeouts must not replace the transaction and ownership rules recorded here.