LMDB is orders of magnitude faster than SQLite, partly because it doesn't need to do fancy ser/deserialization. The alternatives are not better. In fact, SQLit

LMDB is orders of magnitude faster than SQLite, partly because it doesn't need to do fancy ser/deserialization. The alternatives are not better. In fact, SQLite with its B+tree engine replaced by LMDB is still far better than vanilla SQLite - smaller, faster, and more reliable (SQLightning). In a read-only workload, complex deserialization will become your limiting bottleneck, after you've eliminted all other bottlenecks from your code. Our profiling runs of OpenLDAP demonstrated this already, which is why LMDB was written, to allow structs to be persisted in in-memory format and used on read with no deserialization.