After fixing my code to NOT use sqlite3_db_handle(...) as the parameter to sqlite3_errmsg(...), I got a much more reasonable error message: "near "notnull": syntax error". Silly me, it didn't occur to me when I wrote the original code that sqlite3_db_handle(...) wouldn't work after a failure in sqlite3_prepare_v3. Sigh. I still think the documentation should be updated to warn people about keywords being used as column names.