After writing the above comment, memory comes back a bit. The problem is that sqlite does not support renaming a column directly. One can find procedures for that on the internet. E.g., https://tableplus.com/blog/2018/04/sqlite-rename-a-column.ht.... However, we also wanted to be able to rename columns where there are foreign key references, for instance references to the table of which a column was renamend. A generic function, not in sql, but in the programming language of our project, in this case c++, was written for this purpose, something like rename_column(table_name, old_column_name, new_column_name). Needless to say the first version of this function was not quite sufficient leading to the problems that I mentioned. In the end I had to improve this function. I remember at the time I was quite pleased with myself figuring out how to do this without temporarily switching off foreign key checking which the first version of the script had.