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To align with SQLite's built-in case-insensitive column naming, sqlite-utils had to modify multiple areas of its code, not just a single localized fix.
sqlite-utils gains support for compound foreign keys, a feature significant enough that its accompanying breaking change to table.foreign_keys had to be included in the 4.0 stable milestone rather than deferred.
Claude Fable's pre-release review found that Table.delete_where() executes its DELETE without an atomic() wrapper, leaving the connection stuck 'in_transaction', which silently rolls back that delete plus any later writes—even to unrelated tables—when the connection closes.
The author intended to ship sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but working through the backlog with Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 kept expanding the changelog, pushing the release back to rc3.
The 4.0rc2 documentation clarifies that insert(), upsert(), update(), delete() and other write methods each commit their own transaction immediately, and that explicit transaction control (db.atomic() or db.begin()) is only needed for grouping multiple writes or manual management.
Simon Willison admits he hadn't considered Python 3.12's new autocommit connection modes; testing with Fable revealed that db.atomic() and per-method auto-commits broke almost the whole test suite on such connections, requiring a fix so the library would explicitly reject them.
GPT-5.5's review of the release candidate found that db.query() calls db.execute() (which auto-commits) before it checks whether the statement returns rows, so db.query("update ...") actually commits the update even though it then raises a ValueError.