No, you can't do that. In Lr's early days I hoped (as someone who used to implement big SQLServer and Oracle apps) that Adobe would eventually address the multi-user market by offering alternative back ends with record locking, user permissions etc. But I don't think they have ever seen themselves as a company selling database-powered enterprise apps, and nowadays their heads are in the clouds, so to speak.
You can do stuff if you pour in a lot of coding effort. For instance, a LR plugin can listen and respond to http calls (in the format lightroom://mypluginid/?commands=...) and I've a proof-of-concept application which stores data in mySQL and sends it to LR using that mechanism. Or you can certainly read and write to SQLite via an ODBC driver. But I really don't think it's generally worthwhile.
As for database corruption, you can find stories, of course, but relative to the user base it's well below what I ever expected. Within the application you do have an ability to roll back individual images even after a restart, thought you're up the creek if you want to roll multiple images back two history steps after a restart. So long as your are in the same LR session there's a level of undo that's pretty good compared to other desktop database-powered apps.
So, the short answer is no.
