Sounds to me like you're using RDBMS wrong.

Not that it necessarily relates to SQLlite, but I've seen this _many many_ times in real world databases in the banking industry.

Personally I don't like it and I am luckily not in IT, but as an analyst I have seen many weird database structures. One can only imagine the business requirements that gave birth to some of them.

To quote a solutions architect to the head of marketing in a previous job: "You asked for a monster, you got a monster."

Is there something about SQLite's architecture that would make such a schema less problematic in MySQL/PgSQL/etc?

Well, don't do that, normalize your scheme.

When your application grows, eventually you need to de-normalize data if you want to keep having reasonable performance for some operations.

You can reach a point where it's not feasible to have everything done by joins.

EDIT: I mean in relational DBs in general. In this case, 400+ columns probably mean SQLite may not be the engine to use, regardless of schema :)

Can you expand on that?

Isn't 400 columns expanded enough?

It's simply creating a local cache of a remote database that runs on Oracle.

I mean...what kinds of problems did you run into? Thanks.