>Is that an important difference? Who cares how the table is created. You seem to be argumentative instead of trying to understand why they called it "virtual"

>Is that an important difference? Who cares how the table is created. You seem to be argumentative instead of trying to understand why they called it "virtual". I'll try with another example. Let's pretend you have a 10 gigabyte csv file on disk:: Using a real SQLite table: CREATE TABLE t1 (...); -- an empty db file of 8192 bytes .import thefile.csv t1 -- total disk space consumed now 20 GB because .db file is now +10 GB larger SELECT FROM t1; -- SQLite reads from .db file and not the .csv file Using a "virtual" SQLite table: CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE temp.t1 USING csv(filename='thefile.csv'); -- disk space stays the same SELECT from t1; -- SQLite directly reads from csv disk file >Is it a table or not? At the risk of stating the obvious, the extra "VIRTUAL" keyword in between "CREATE" and "TABLE" thus makes a virtual table. It is a "table" in the sense that it "acts like a table" via an interface for SQL queries. However, it's not a real table in the sense that there's no data blocks within the .db that represents that table. It's virtual. I'm not understanding what annoys you about their description.