In my particular case it was also a design decision made back in 2006 or 2007 already. It's designed for fast random reads from the ground up due to the versioning focus (reading page-fragments from different revisions, as it just stores fragments of record-pages). I'll change the algorithm slightly to fetch the fragments in parallel (should be fast on modern hardware, that is even SSDs and in the future for instance with byte-addressable non-volatile memory).