alt Hacker NewsI dont think the author could even use SQLite for this. NULL in SQLite is stored very compactly, not as pre-filled zeros. Must be talking about a columnar store.
I wonder if attaching a temporary db on fast storage, filled with results of the dense queries, would work without the big assumptions.
I think I did a poor job of explaining. SQLite is dealing with cached filesystem blocks here, and has nothing to do with their query engine. They aren't migrating their query engine to SQLite, they're migrating their sparse file cache to SQLite. The SQLite blobs will be holding ranges of RocksDB file data.
RocksDB has a pluggable filesystem layer (similar to SQLite virtual filesystems), they can read blocks from the SQLite cache layer directly without needing to fake a RocksDB file at all. This is how my solution (I've implemented this before) works. Mine is SQLite both places: one SQLite file (normal) holds cached blocks and another SQLite file (with virtual filesystem) runs queries against the cache layer. They can do this with SQLite holding the cache and RocksDB running the queries.
IMO, a little more effort would have given them a better solution.