SQLite Archive format support

[philo23]

When I originally read that this included a SQLite provider I was hoping to find out it was based on the SQLite archive format, I was just wondering if you'd consider using it?

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

It's pretty niche, but I think the biggest benefit I can see is that you'd be able to easily create pre-made VFS's and export ones created from NodeJS into a format that sqlite itself already has tooling to dealing with: sqlite3 -A / sqlar

The only downside I can see is your schema includes a lot more metadata (as you'd expect from a filesystem vs a zip-like archive) but because it is just a sqlite database at the end of the day, you can add your own custom tables for metadata along side the sqlar table.

You might even be able to add new columns for the missing metadata to the sqlar table itself, but I've not tested that.

CREATE TABLE sqlar(
  name   TEXT PRIMARY KEY,  -- name of the file
  mode   INT,               -- access permissions
  mtime  INT,              -- last modification time
  sz     INT,                 -- original file size
  data   BLOB               -- (optionally) compressed content
);

vs

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS entries (
  path        TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  parent_path TEXT,
  name        TEXT,
  type        INTEGER NOT NULL,
  content     BLOB,
  target      TEXT,
  mode        INTEGER NOT NULL,
  mtime       REAL NOT NULL,
  ctime       REAL NOT NULL,
  birthtime   REAL NOT NULL
);