I find EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN a lot more useful to figuring out perf issues with sqlite. You can immediately see the table scan and tweak the query until it goes away. It still doesn't EXPLAIN everything, like

- why did it choose not to use an index?

- why does it need to do a scan of another table (oh there is FK)

- which part of the query plan is actually the expensive one.

For that you need to go to something like this:

https://github.com/asutherland/grok-sqlite-explain

http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2010/04/06/performance-annotat...