[tantalor]

The title is a joke, right? It's not actually "faster than the filesystem" unless it's not using the filesystem; it's faster than something else that also uses the filesystem because they use different system calls (context switching).

[naikrovek]

you can be faster than the filesystem, while using the filesystem, if you emulate something the filesystem does poorly in a more performant way.

That's what's happening here. storing files in SQLite removes any per-file overhead in the filesystem. The filesystem now only has one file to deal with, instead of however many are stored inside the SQLite database.

This is a very real phenomenon, and definitely not a joke.