It would be easier to help if you could show - what you did - what the result was - why you think the result is incorrect Ther is nothing weird about the _errcode() and _errmsg(). The former returns a numerical code that is useful for the calling program to decide a plan of action, while the latter returns a descriptive text that a programmer can use to determine the cause of the problem. So what would "the PRAGMA for proper schema name" be, what did it return and how did you determine that "master" was the schema name of the database implicitly attached by calling sqlite3_open()?