It was the "converting identifiers to their simplest form" that I found useful Richard but this does make it less so. If I wanted to interpret user sql and they input select "tbl" . [col] from tbl; it will be normalized to SELECT tbl.col FROM tbl; -- useful but select "tbl" . 'col' from tbl; will be normalized to SELECT tbl.?FROM tbl; -- less useful although both the original sql's will return the exact same result. I'm guessing that I'm using sqlite3_normalized_sql for something it's not intended for. Wish I knew what it was intended for though.