What if OpenDocument used SQLite? (2014)
The problem with SQLite is that it's not a standardized file format. It's well-documented and pretty well understood for sure, but there's no ISO standard defining how to interpret an SQLite file in excruciating detail. Same goes for competing implementations, Zip and XML have a much smaller API surface than SQLite, whose API, apart from a bunch of C functions,  is the SQL language itself. Writing an XML parser is not a trivial task, but it's still simpler than writing an SQL parser, query optimizer, compiler, bytecode VM, full-text search engine, and whatever else Sqlite offers, without any data corruption in the process. If Open Office used SQLite, its programmers would inevitably start using its more esoteric features and writing queries that a less-capable engine wouldn't be able to optimize too well.This isn't a concern for most software. If you're writing a domain-specific, closed-source application where interoperability with other apps or ISO standardization isn't a concern, SQLite is a perfectly fine file format, but as far as I understand the situation, those concerns did exist for Open Office.