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I don't think anybody is suggesting that SQLite archives are a suitable replacement for ZIP or tar + compressor of choice general-purpose compression duties. T

I don't think anybody is suggesting that SQLite archives are a suitable replacement for ZIP or tar + compressor of choice general-purpose compression duties. The docs for this seem to suggest that this extension is most useful when your application already heavily depends on SQLite and you need a place to store some files but don't want to introduce further OS-specific dependencies into your application. This is a low-effort solution to a rather specific problem. Which is why it's not part of SQLite proper. The extension itself is 124 lines of C including comments for heaven's sake.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
The extension only deals with the compression part. The actual operation happens in the shell which is intermingled with general archive support. And this suggests the most important fact: SQLite already supports an ordinary ZIP file via the zipfile virtual table [1]. Both zipfile and sqlar extensions are enabled when compiled with zlib, and it is not even like that sqlar came first (they are added roughly together AFAIK). Therefore if you have SQLite and want to have a cheap file archive support, you can just use zip instead of the inferior sqlar. [1] https://sqlite.org/zipfile.html https://sqlite.org/zipfile.html