Or should I use a different hammer to fix this problem.
I\'ve got a very simple use-case for storing data, effectively a sparse matrix, which I\'ve attempted to stor
Are you inserting all of the 800 elements at once? If you are, doing the inserts within a transaction will speed up the process dramatically.
See http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19
SQLite can handle very large databases. See http://www.sqlite.org/limits.html