If you squint really hard you could make that case, but in SQLite they are really not the same. You cannot use SQL syntax and you can't do other operations on

If you squint really hard you could make that case, but in SQLite they are really not the same. You cannot use SQL syntax and you can't do other operations on cursors other than read the columns for the matching row. Virtually all other database engines calculate the query results up front. It is more effective in their implementations to do it that way. For example they will also calls to ask how many rows remain in the results. SQLite has no such API and the only way to find out is to actually retrieve each result row.