I can see your points. Dev is a large team effort here, so we usually don't need to do ad hoc changes to the schema. We have a Data Model stored a xml files, which are run through a "Data Model Compiler" to produce config files for the backing stores and the corresponding Virtual Table modules. Backing stores are rebuilt during install if necessary. So our DDL statements look like CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE <table> USING <module> (<config file>,<entry>); And the module already knows what the row looks like and which keys are defined. Being that SQLite is used as a reporting/diagnosis tool here, we don't really miss triggers. Thinking about adding indeces to virtual tables just made me realise that we actually could add them to the backing store without telling SQLite anything about it. A process restart is all that would be required.