alt Hacker NewsIt seems SQLite could be evolve to solve this by just bundling itself entirely in the data files? After all, the binary is less than 1MB, anywhere you’re putting a database surely has at least that much overhead, for most applications it’s less than a drop in the bucket.
I’d be interested to learn if there are any db implementations that take this approach, or reasons this wouldn’t work.
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Well you'd have the problem that an sqlite database file created on a Linux AMD64 box could be copied to an AArch64 macOS machine to be read there. And quite a lot of (cross platform) software build their file formats on top of SQLite.
So for every new SQLite db you want to access would have to run a new untrusted executable? That seems… hilariously bad for security.
There is a way to do this with sqlite in readonly mode using the append vfs [0] which allows you to put your DB appended to the end of the executable, and then the executable can read it (like a zip file the header is then at the end of the db rather than the front). Or you could embed a normal db as a binary blob with the linker. Allowing writes is more tricky because most OSes don't typically allow executables to edit their own executable memory (on unix I believe executables always load as r/x or r/o depending on the region, maybe with some minor exceptions).
And a lot of users of sqlite statically link sqlite within their executable, they actually recommend that instead of dynamically linking.
[0] https://sqlite.org/vfs.html ctrl-f for 'append'
Edit: I got confused between the sqlar command and the append vfs so fixed it.