investigate contents of a sqlite3 file

I have created a new, clean firefox profile from scratch, and added couple of bookmarks. These, I have learned, are stored in places.sqlite file inside the profile directory. This file seems to be too big (1.2 MB) and I am wondering why: $ ls -lh places.sqlite -rw------- 1 martin martin 1.2M Sep 8 07:24 places.sqlite When I open it with sqlite3 from the commandline, I see there are couple of tables: $ sqlite3 places.sqlite SQLite version 3.7.13 2012-06-11 02:05:22 sqlite> .tables moz_anno_attributes moz_favicons moz_items_annos moz_annos moz_historyvisits moz_keywords moz_bookmarks moz_hosts moz_places moz_bookmarks_roots moz_inputhistory but none of them contain much data (I have tried SELECT * FROM ; for all of them). Further, if I dump the entire database into file dump.sqlite: sqlite> .output dump.sqlite sqlite> .dump The file has only couple of KB: $ ls -lh total 1.2M -rw------- 1 martin martin 39K Sep 8 19:01 dump.sqlite -rw------- 1 martin martin 1.2M Sep 8 07:24 places.sqlite I am aware of the vacuum command in sqlite3. I did that, but it has no effect. The database file is still same size. How can I investigate why the database file is so big, and what does it contain ?