You can read and write sqlite files entirely without the library. The file format is available on the sqlite site. SQLJet proves the point that you don't need 139,000 lines of C code to use sqlite files.
I'm sure you could make a tool which could read and write to SQL Servers mdf files. That wouldn't change that SQL Server is a RDBMS.
It's a file format with a very mature and nice library around it. At the end of a day it's just fwrite() and fread() with SQL syntax.
Re:SQLite Is Serverless
by ldiracdelta on Monday January 27, 2020 @08:42AM
(#22159089)
And perhaps python is just glorified assembly, but it seems to me to be a "difference in degree that leads to a difference in kind."
> It's just a file format.
This is clearly incorrect. It does encompass a file format, but it also contains code to manage that file. The existence of sqljet does not change this, it's merely a different database management system that uses the same file format.
You also seem to mostly ignore that the data it's managing is a relational database, not some other form of data. This is why you can't compare it to python's csv module or python-docx, neither of these do anything to restrict you to a relational data model, nor do they provide a system to query them as if they were a relational database. On the other hand, if for some unknown reason you rewrite the storage engine of postgresql to use the either the sqlite file format or csv/docx, I assume you agree it would still be an RDBMS.
Ultimately I think you're just adding to the confusion by saying that a project with 139,000 lines of C code is "just a file format".