I don't understand how this is possible, as a database is an abstraction on top of the filesystem. Perhaps for certain workloads, it may hit RAM more frequentl

I don't understand how this is possible, as a database is an abstraction on top of the filesystem. Perhaps for certain workloads, it may hit RAM more frequently than disk, making it faster. But for large binary blobs, Sqlite is way slower than the file system on Linux.