The [Fossil version control system][1] (used by SQLite itself) uses SQLite as a file format, and has done so for over 13 years now, and the issue of a valid schema has never come up. So, unless you have an unusual situation, I think you are worrying about a non-issue. Yes, somebody could go in a mess with the schema of your file format, which could cause grief for your application. But anybody with permission to do that likely already has full access to your machine, so they do not have any new capabilities for mischief. [1]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki Perhaps you are worried about receiving a file over the internet from an unknown or untrusted source and submitting that file to your application? In this case you should take precautions as outlined in the [Defense Against Dark Arts][2] document. [2]: https://www.sqlite.org/security.html If you really, really want to check the schema, you can do so by examining the sqlite_schema table. The entire database schema is contained there. When SQLite is starting up and needs to read in the database schema, it just runs "SELECT * FROM sqlite_schema". So if you do the same in your application, you are seeing exactly what SQLite sees.