Comment by HackerThemAll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HackerThemAll | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I have been amazed for an entire life how many tools the IT industry invented during last 50 years to just disguise a database.

OK, in '70s, '80s or '90s when compute and storage resources were limited and every bit counted, specialized formats did make sense.

But nowadays we'd save enormous efforts by just packaging stuff in SQLite databases. Microsoft's proprietary file formats (Office, Power BI etc.), OpenOffice/LibreOffice OpenDocument format, or almost everything else would fit perfectly.

Documents, files, are all data (called "data files", aren't they?), including executables, which as can be seen in this article are also databases.

https://sqlite.org/aff_short.html

https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

Some of it is convergent evolution at work. 60s/70s/80s specialized formats as much predated modern database designs and data structures as coexisted with them. SQLite is the culmination of decades of database design. Some of that was influenced by those specialized formats of previous decades that SQLite could now in theory replace.

(Which is to say a lot of the specialized formats didn't exist just because of compute and storage resource limitations, but also because training/research/standards work came later. Plus complications like software patents. ZIP files have been around since the 1990s but ZIP only became a common general use container format for "everything" almost exactly 14 years later when patents finally expired.)

At first I thought it was still for a word document to be saved in SQL but then I thought about embedded images and it makes complete sense. Makes more sense for a Publisher/Impress app though as they have more self-contained objects. In Word/Writer the main text is one huge run of characters, how would you sqlize that effectively?

Current ooxml/odt formats use a zip file with xml files inside (plus other files like images). I'd guess one way would be to store the xml itself as a blob and another to use a json field, which Sqlite stores in a more efficient format called jsonb: https://sqlite.org/json1.html#jsonb

Typo correction: At first I thought it was silly

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