I wouldn’t call this next-gen SQLite. How can it be when the “QL” of SQLite is “Query Language” and this doesn’t have one? This is an object serialization library.
[1] this figure is based on no research
Where `:people` is a key in a huge (larger than memory) map. This database will only touch the referenced nodes when traversing, without loading the whole thing into memory.
So the 'query language' is actually your programming language. To the programmer this database looks like an in-memory data structure, when in fact it's efficiently reading data from the disk. Plus immutability of course (meaning you can go back in history).