What you seem to be missing is that when you read the row that physically has fewer columns written in it than the current table schema defines, that SQLite will add in those columns with the default values. In fact, my understanding is that for most purposes, unless you low-level read the raw database and go around SQLite itself, you can't tell by reading it that the values aren't there. I think the one exception is that you can detect that the data isn't there by reading the record, changing the default with an alter table, and read the record again. Columns with no value and just getting the default will change here, while once the record actually get re-written, the value will stick to the default value written when the record was written.