My guess is that the query itself takes the same amount of time either way, C API or CLI. There may be some I/O overhead when using sqlite3, but I doubt if it's

My guess is that the query itself takes the same amount of time either way, C API or CLI. There may be some I/O overhead when using sqlite3, but I doubt if it's anything to worry about. The beauty of using sqlite3 is that it hides the complexity of the C API, which is procedural.