The point is that having a way of accessing a column rather than needing to parse to find a byte is only a partial answer to the problem of file formats. The co

The point is that having a way of accessing a column rather than needing to parse to find a byte is only a partial answer to the problem of file formats. The consuming application still needs custom code to comprehend the format, and the physical layout of data within is often only a small part of that. IMO Sqlite would be a terrible format for e.g. a word processor. Database style formats are good when partial updates are the norm, but if your application typically needs the entire data model in memory, a relational mapping is unpleasant overhead.