We use SQLite exactly for that. At some point we were generating +50000 shader (.hlsl) files for 3 different platforms (so much due to various techsets and tech

We use SQLite exactly for that. At some point we were generating +50000 shader (.hlsl) files for 3 different platforms (so much due to various techsets and techniques). Loading them back from the tools/game took a long time, for that reason they were put in small SQLite db - which is a little bit more complex than this "CREATE TABLE files (key, value)" This sped up us significantly. We might be using this idea for more and more small files lying around.