What's the proper way to report a bug in SQLite? I would be inclined to call this a bug, since this is a small database. I've only attempted to rename a column twice, in two different tables, but both times it took about 3 hours. This is not a large database and I have no triggers or references constraints. I have not done any additional experiments, e.g., in an empty database, since obviously there are other ways to accomplish this. I'm running on macOS 10.14.6 (18G3020) Here is a log of the second column rename: sqlite> .schema dict_v3 CREATE TABLE dict_v3( "Variable / Field Name" TEXT, "Form Name" TEXT, "Section Header" TEXT, "Field Type" TEXT, "Field Label" TEXT, "Choices, Calculations, OR Slider Labels" TEXT, "Field Note" TEXT, "Text Validation Type OR Show Slider Number" TEXT, "Text Validation Min" TEXT, "Text Validation Max" TEXT, "Identifier?" TEXT, "Branching Logic (Show field only if...)" TEXT, "Required Field?" TEXT, "Custom Alignment" TEXT, "Question Number (surveys only)" TEXT, "Matrix Group Name" TEXT, "Matrix Ranking?" TEXT, "Field Annotation" TEXT ); sqlite> alter table dict_v3 rename "Variable / Field Name" to variable; Run Time: real 11144.591 user 11068.905764 sys 20.954366 sqlite> .dbinfo database page size: 4096 write format: 1 read format: 1 reserved bytes: 0 file change counter: 21589 database page count: 16918 freelist page count: 1 schema cookie: 22987 schema format: 4 default cache size: 0 autovacuum top root: 0 incremental vacuum: 0 text encoding: 1 (utf8) user version: 0 application id: 0 software version: 3031001 number of tables: 50 number of indexes: 0 number of triggers: 0 number of views: 48 schema size: 532422 data version 3 sqlite> select 11144.591/60; 185.743183333333 Run Time: real 0.000 user 0.000047 sys 0.000019 sqlite> select 11144.591/60/60; 3.09571972222222 Run Time: real 0.000 user 0.000046 sys 0.000008 sqlite>