What if OpenDocument used SQLite? (2014)

Suppose the OpenDocument file format, and specifically the "ODP" OpenDocument Presentation format, were built around SQLite. The OpenDocument file format is used for office applications: word processors, spreadsheets, and presentations. An OpenDocument Presentation or "ODP" file is a ZIP archive containing XML files describing presentation slides and separate image files for the various images that are included as part of the presentation. In keeping with the pile-of-files theme, OpenDocument stores all slide content in a single big XML file named "Content.xml". The OpenDocument is still a pile-of-files, only now each file is a row in an SQLite database rather than an entry in a ZIP archive. The SQLite database file is about a half percent smaller than the equivalent ODP file! How can this be? Apparently the ZIP archive generator logic in NeoOffice is not as efficient as it could be, because when the same pile-of-files is recompressed using the command-line "Zip" utility, one gets a file that is smaller still, by another half percent, as seen in the third line above. In summary, the claim of this essay is that using SQLite as a container for an application file format like OpenDocument and storing lots of smaller objects in that container works out much better than using a ZIP archive holding a few larger objects.