WAL/checkpointing is about control over durability and crash behavior, not “better vectors.”

  sqlite-vec and Qdrant are storage engines first; their durability is mostly “under the hood.” If your goal is a clean
  local RAG system, owning that layer can be better when you want:

  1. deterministic ingest semantics (append-only event log of chunks, then materialize state),
  2. fast recovery from partial writes (replay only WAL since last checkpoint),
  3. precise checkpoint boundaries tuned to your app (e.g., after every batch/conv/session ingest),
  4. a single-file, dependency-light artifact you can own end-to-end.

  That’s why it can be better than sqlite-vec/Qdrant in this specific case: not for raw ANN quality, but for operational
  predictability + composability of ingestion, retrieval, and memory lifecycle in one library.
  If you don’t care about that control and are fine with a managed server/extension model, built-ins are usually the
  simpler and smarter choice.