> the size of this array is very large On what machine supporting SQLite is 4.6875 kiB "very large?" I mean, yes, it's very large on an Apple //e, but that won't run SQLite at all, so... Quoting Donald Knuth: > Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Here I think you're over-valuing space optimization, paying a cost not only in CPU optimization during parsing, but also CPU time to re-convert doubles back to strings for storage. Worse, I think you're overspending on *programmer* time, the most precious commodity of all on most projects. How much RAM and disk space does your hourly rate buy?