Are there any tips for speeding up SQLite through Unity on iOS

Aren't you comparing the performance of a low-power mobile CPU against a desktop or laptop CPU with multiple cores, a large cache that has had 30 years of development effort to make it crunch through data?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm comparing. And I suppose a SQLite expert could tell me that it's just the speed of the device. Or a Mono expert could tell me that this is a known issue with Mono on the iPhone. There are all sorts of apps out there that crunch SQLite data very quickly and it's one of apple's preferred ways to store data, so I would assume that for a relatively small select statement (in the grand scheme of things) performance should be better than what I'm getting.

They are using CoreData, not SQLite directly. Thats a day - night difference as apple opted CoreData to be invisible, smart and opted for the small to inexistent cashes that the mobile cpus have. Thats why you can crunch through programs with 200+ element listviews with detailed views behind it with images and movies etc all invisible with 20lines of code in Core Data at high performance and why the same in pure sqlite is gonna stutter like hell in basically any application.