Dear All, I have come up with a partial solution in C - not ideal since I'd like to call this from Perl, but for the moment it'll do and it'll have to be a qx job until I have time to turn it into a Perl API call. To save on cross posting, see the following link: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/13518 (or here: http://www.mail-archive.com/sqlite-users%40sqlite.org/ and look for the subject - hadn't propagated yet to give a msgid #). Kind regards Derek Jones.