> Writing an XML parser is not a trivial task, but it's still simpler than writing an SQL parser, query optimizer, compiler, bytecode VM, full-text search engin

> Writing an XML parser is not a trivial task, but it's still simpler than writing an SQL parser, query optimizer, compiler, bytecode VM, full-text search engine, and whatever else Sqlite offers, without any data corruption in the process. Just to clarify: You don't actually need to implement all that for it to be a standardized file format, any more than you need to implement all the spreadsheet functionality to be able to read a LibreOffice spreadsheet. All you need to do is to be able to reconstruct the tables. There's no reason, having reconstructed the tables, you couldn't write your own imperative code in the language of your choice to go over them and get whatever information you wanted.