One thing I don’t see mentioned yet is that efficiency isn’t the only reason multiple queries can be problematic. There’s also consistency. This might not matte

One thing I don’t see mentioned yet is that efficiency isn’t the only reason multiple queries can be problematic. There’s also consistency. This might not matter for many SQLite use cases, or in general for blocking single-reader calls. But if your database might be handling concurrent writes that could occur between any two reads, reducing the overhead to zero still might not be worth the tradeoff.