SQLite Commands

This chapter will explain the simple yet useful commands used by SQLite programmers. These commands are called SQLite dot commands, and the difference is that they do not end with a semicolon;end.

Let's type a simplesqlite3command. At the SQLite command prompt, you can use various SQLite commands.

$ sqlite3
SQLite version 3.3.6
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite>

To get a list of the available dot commands, you can enter ".help" at any time. For example:

sqlite>.help

The above command will display a list of various important SQLite dot commands, as shown below:

Let's try using.showcommand to view the default settings of the SQLite command prompt.

sqlite>.show
     echo: off
  explain: off
  headers: off
     mode: column
nullvalue: ""
   output: stdout
separator: "|"
    width:
sqlite>

Make sure there is no space between the sqlite> prompt and the dot command, otherwise it will not work properly.

Formatting Output

You can use the following dot commands to format the output into the formats listed below in this tutorial:

sqlite>.header on
sqlite>.mode column
sqlite>.timer on
sqlite>

The above settings will produce output in the following format:

ID          NAME        AGE         ADDRESS     SALARY
----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  ----------
1           Paul        32          California  20000.0
2           Allen       25          Texas       15000.0
3           Teddy       23          Norway      20000.0
4           Mark        25          Rich-Mond   65000.0
5           David       27          Texas       85000.0
6           Kim         22          South-Hall  45000.0
7           James       24          Houston     10000.0
CPU Time: user 0.000000 sys 0.000000

sqlite_master Table

The master table stores the key information of database tables and names itsqlite_master. To view the table summary, do the following:

sqlite>.schema sqlite_master

This will produce the following result:

CREATE TABLE sqlite_master (
  type text,
  name text,
  tbl_name text,
  rootpage integer,
  sql text
);