It's not particularly designed for speed - it should be fast as far as Python code goes (I use some generator tricks to stream data and avoid having to load everything into memory at once) but I wouldn't expect "sqlite-utils insert" to win any performance competitions with tools written in other languages.

Those benchmarks against sqlite itself are definitely interesting. I'm looking forward to playing with the "native ZNG support for Python" mentioned on https://github.com/brimdata/zed/blob/main/docs/libraries/pyt... when that becomes available.