I just took a look at the SQLite API documentation at http://www.sqlite.org/capi3ref.html and it seems it just about everywhere expects data to be entered/extracted as either UTF-8 or UTF-16, and since Nilsson decided to use the UTF-8 variants of the API I also agree with the "implicit" UTF-8 conversions (the only reasonable alternative would have been "implicit" UTF-16 conversion). Note that BLOB fields naturally should not be converted.