Even if the SQLite3.exe remains as it is, it is now good to know where "performance killers" might come from ... did you ever thought about comments as being a reason? In first point I also expected that something with my sql statements might have been bad when the whole did not finish within 15 minutes - but then I tried one framing transaction for all the individual inserts and it did not become significantly faster (this has usually helped me in the past) ... and then I tried to reduce the text to find the bottle neck. Finally I stayed with almost just the remaining comment block. I did not expect the text to ignore being the reason for performance drop. Sorry for having bothered you with my exceptional finding; however, hopefully someone at some day will find it helpful being mentioned here.