During one of my personal projects, I had to use ‘.import’ command of the sqlite3 shell. The .import command is very limited in functionality. It also always binds column data as text. This has performance hit as well as disk usage hit. I also need some very basic conversion support like store numbers as numbers in db files as well as some way to parse date related data.
All these needs leads for the development of sqliteloader which csv files to sqlite easy.