Objective-c – Some changes to SQLite database are not persisting after app close and relaunch

I've got an iPhone app I'm developing and when the app launches I open an SQLite database connection, and I close it when the application terminates. The database is in the application documents folder.

During the lifetime of the app I run several INSERT and UPDATE statements. However, for some reason my UPDATE statements are not saving properly once the application is closed and then restarted. I am calling sqlite3_prepare_v2, sqlite3_step and sqlite3_finalize properly so I'm sure the transactions should be finalized. I've added breakpoints on all those 3 functions and they are all being hit okay and all returning the correct values.

When I close the application after an update and look in the documents directory I can see another database file with -journal after it. Does this mean something's not working properly transaction wise?

I've also noticed that in my applicationWillTerminate: method where I close the connection using sqlite3_close(), that it is returning SQLITE_BUSY. Why could this be?

I've been struggling for a whole day now so I really hope someone can point me in the right direction!

Here's my code to perform my update queries:

// Update statement
sqlite3_stmt *stmt;
char *query = "UPDATE records SET fielda = ? WHERE pkfield = ?;";
if (sqlite3_prepare_v2(database, query, -1, &stmt, nil) == SQLITE_OK &&

   // Bind
   sqlite3_bind_text(stmt, 1, [myNSStringVar UTF8String], -1, nil) == SQLITE_OK &&
   sqlite3_bind_int(stmt, 2, recordID) == SQLITE_OK) {

   // Execute
   int ret = sqlite3_step(stmt);
   if (ret == SQLITE_DONE) {
      sqlite3_finalize(stmt);
   }
}