I'm trying to look up the current time in a database ...The database is read only.
Eh?
How can you look up the current time in a read only database? The time changes all the, errr, time; a read only database never changes. It is not possible to have the current time in a read only database. You need a clock of some kind.
wrybread:
I'm looking up the current time in the database to see if there's a record attached to it.
How do you envisage relating the current time to a record in the database since, by definition, the database must have been written when what is now the current time was some distance in the future?
And if you do have a text database with 1.6MB of data wouldn't it be an awful lot easier to process it with Python on an RPi? And if the data has some structure to it you could make life easier still by using a database program like SQLite.