First of all, just to be sure, the example you provided had an opening double-quote, but not a closing one. I am assuming that this is a typo. Did you RTFC :)? (I understand that having only one eye can make this kind of hard). I looked at dbdimp.c line 271. It looks to me like the DBD api for SQLite may not use the dot notation for commands. Did you try it without the leading dot? Also, from the code, it looks like it is possible to turn on message tracing. This might help you out as well.
Illuminatus