“ELF is already a database. It just implements many database primitives by hand.”
String interning, indexes, foreign keys. ELF does all of it with hand-rolled offset math nobody wants to touch. Zakaria packed 723 executables and 400 libraries into one SQLite file at 611.9 MiB against 644.4 MiB of ELF, and dedup came free from the schema. The 5ms startup penalty will kill it for anything hot. Worth reading anyway for what it exposes about the format we are stuck with.