The extension only deals with the compression part. The actual operation happens in the shell which is intermingled with general archive support. And this sugge

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