I had asked Richard about this back when the **innocuous** flags were added and that was the reason he gave me (I used to just put all the catalog views in each database itself) and that was the answer he gave me. I suppose you could go either way -- however -- at least if they are in the temp database you know that only you could have put them there ... subsequent to opening the database connection and that they cannot have been externally manipulated. That is why they load into temp (and drop any equivalents that exist before they are added). The CLI can load them just fine using the .sqliterc and for other applications they can be handcoded in the application to be loaded (for example I modified APSW (by overriding the connection class) so that they are loaded into temp when each connection is opened).