What are you actually trying to do? What "my function" are you talking about? The progress handler is a function written by yourself that you ask to SQLite to call after every N virtual machine instructions are executed. It's only purpose is to notify your application that N virtual machine instructions have been executed and the query is still not completed. Your progress handler is then required to return 0 (continue) or non-zero (interrupt), in the latter case, the query will be terminated immediately, without returning another row. Calling the progress handler function directly does nothing to SQLite. Perhaps you are looking for the sqlite3_interrupt() function. Calling this function will terminate the execution of any currently running query on the referenced database Connection.