In order to know/report whether or not any values were *actually* modified, sqlite would have to read all of the possibly-to-be-updated fields of the older records for every row of *every* update and compare them to the being-written values in the new records (remember that sqlite doesn't update records in-place). The performance hit would be non-trivial and would affect *every* update, even though only a small percentage of cases actually make use of the changes values.