If you’re been a ‘good little IT guy’ 
(I’m an EE/CE myself so know the drill)
Something must have gone astray long ago.
I am glad you’re back on the right track.
fwiw: I did a test of sqlite3 not too long ago. I loaded a test DB with 32M records. I then did a query which would hit on 10% of them. From query start until all results retrieved in my program was about 600 ms. (3rd gen i7 at 2.7 Ghz) which isn’t half bad.
