That -is- fast, but I still have trouble reconciling that deep down in my computer, a human readable SQL query gets built, and then another process parses that SQL. Seems so wasteful building and then parsing a human readable string for something that's happening on the same machine.

I know nothing of SQLites's internals, but wouldnt it make more sense to parse the query once and then store a compiled version of the query for subsequent lookups? Like you might do with a regexp?