Yes, handle statefulness is very important.

A cheap way to detect and handle this condition in your application code is to call fstat on the open file handle and check the number of references. If that number drops to zero, you have an orphan. Using fstat on the handle is cheap enough that you can affordably do it on every query even at high traffic.

I expanded on this approach in a previous comment on a project which live-syncs SQLite changes (which might be useful for your application) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884461