It's not interacting with a file, it's interacting with a file that contains other files of varying sizes that need to be accessed randomly with good performance.

If you want to do random writes then more consideration is needed.

And programmatically accessing them is significantly more complicated than using SQLite which involves dropping a single header in your project and about 10 lines of code.

> If you want to do random writes then more consideration is needed.

Which you almost certainly what you want to do for the sorts of use cases where SQLite is also under consideration.

10 lines of user code + the sqlite library. Using other formats like zip is hardly any more user code (+ some external library).

Btw I'm personally a big fan of SQLite, I just think the argument here is a bit of a straw man.

Sure, it's completely trivial to read a file containing an array of C structs of metadata and offsets into a blob of concatenated PNGs: just mmap the thing, and your main data structure is sitting right there in memory.

But problems start arising when you need to update the structure of that metadata. Add some more fields. Some more structured, multi-value fields, referring to multiple entities in your increasingly complex data structure. Entities which must be guaranteed to exist. And perform modifications concurrently, from multiple processes. And have the file not get corrupted when something kills a writer process in the middle of writing...

Databases are slow and overkill for the simple case, but they certainly make adding unexpected requested features much easier. And it can be expected that you will get unexpected feature requests.