Simon, brilliant observations here and kudos on sqlite-utils.

I'm all for layers, a fundamental approach in our field to tame complexity. And the SQL model and SQLite have stood the test of time and are solid foundations.

I'm just wondering could we be stuck in a local maximum where the presumed answer is always the relational model? Maybe if we built the relational model on top of a different set of lower-level primitives (a type system instead of schemas and tables) we could escape local maximum we're stuck in? Just a thought.

There are a few somewhat ad hoc perf measurements here regarding the sqlite-utils and sqlite... https://zed.brimdata.io/docs/commands/zq/#73-performance-com...

I'm not a SQLite expert so if I did something wrong, please holler and let me know :)