[giovannibonetti]

If it's going to be read-only, why not make it a Parquet file instead? It should result in a smaller file size due to columnar compression.

DuckDB has built-in capability to read Parquet files with HTTP range requests.

[electroly]

For this use case we need the ability to do an indexed query and extract a small number of rows from a large database. It's a traditional row-oriented database workload. I'm sure other solutions would also work, but SQLite's design melds well with the data. The migration from partitioned SQL Server tables to a collection of SQLite database files was straightforward.