How to Change the Command Line Prompt in SQLite

If you’ve ever used the SQLite command line shell, you’re probably familiar with the default command line prompt. Actually, there are two prompts:

  • The default main prompt looks like this: sqlite>
  • The default continuation prompt looks like this: ...>

If you don’t like these prompts, you can always change them with the .prompt dot command.

This article provides a quick demonstration on how to change these prompts.

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How AUTOINCREMENT Works in SQLite

In SQLite, an AUTOINCREMENT column is one that uses an automatically incremented value for each row that’s inserted into the table.

There are a couple of ways you can create an AUTOINCREMENT column:

  • You can create it implicitly when you define the column as INTEGER PRIMARY KEY.
  • You can create it explicitly with the AUTOINCREMENT keyword. One downside of this method is that it uses extra CPU, memory, disk space, and disk I/O overhead.

Both methods cause the column to use an incrementing value each time a new row is inserted with NULL in that column.

However, there are some subtle differences between how each method works.

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