I find this hard to buy. Let's start with just one downside (which imo is the killer misfeature): startup time. According to the OP article you have to read t

I find this hard to buy. Let's start with just one downside (which imo is the killer misfeature): startup time. According to the OP article you have to read the entire xml before you can do anything with it. Surely even if you weren't designing SQLite, it should be possible to design a binary format such that you can read relevant information quickly without loading and parsing the entire binary file.