You make a good point regarding the spirit versus ostensible thrust of the OP's original post. I have to admit being unsure what its point really was<sup>a</sup>, and latching onto its most obvious aspect. However, taking "revised schema only" as a stand-in for "data altered to no longer be consistent with schema", my point about the discrepancy remains: A corrupt DB, whether made corrupt by simple, repeatable or mysterious means, is not going to have defined behavior or even behavior that should be expected to remain the same across SQLite releases. There have been many recent changes to how the library detects and responds to DB corruption. They help avoid (further) data loss and ease the task of avoiding/reducing undefined behavior in the C/C++ UB sense. This kind of evolution simply cannot be confined to perpetuate the behavior (or misbehavior) of past releases under such conditions. Your point about sanity checks versus performance is well taken. ---- a. During my perplexity on the point, I've been tempted to parody it, along lines of" "I crossed out 'Apples' on this bag of fruit and wrote 'Oranges', then pulled an apple out." But it was too crude and not quite on point. And likely to seem unkind.