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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

But you don't need a standard, because all interaction between applications and the document is made through SQL. And SQL is standardized (at least the parts that matter). If you have concerns about compatibility, make sure that the document can also be accessed through other databases (like mysql).

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But other databases cannot access sqlite databases, because the file format is internal...

https://github.com/pgspider/sqlite_fdw

I'll admit, that's a fantastic third party effort. But there definitely isn't the same level of first party support as there is for zip files.

SQL file format is very well documented. In some universities it is an assignment to directly read and write sqllite files from disk and understand the paged and blocks structure.

You don’t need sql for any of it.

https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html

> In some universities it is an assignment to directly read and write sqllite files from disk and understand the paged and blocks structure.

do you have any links?

It's interesting that this is a classroom assignment, like the sibling comment, I'd curious which university / class this was. I did the read part (+ query planning) on my own as an exercise, but I haven't gotten around to implementing writing yet.

You do need to parse DDL to get the column names, they're stored as a "CREATE TABLE" string. But you don't have to if you want to dump the file without names.

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/sqljs

They can if they want to, using the standard SQLite lib or their own implementation.

>at least the parts that matter

In my experience every part matters in non-trivial use cases since someone somewhere will use that part.

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