This is something we seriously considered. The SQLite dbs are several hundred megabytes in size (millions of IP ranges) so while it would be technically doable to send around rules files as JSON or something more specifically suited there's still a number of wins that SQLite gives us:
- Really strong support across multiple platforms (we have clients for most of the major web frameworks)
- Efficiency, sure we have lots of RAM on servers nowdays but on some platforms it's constrained and if you don't have to burn it, we'd just rather not.
- When we started mapping this out, we ended up with something that looked like a JSON format that we were adding indexes to....and then we were re-inventing SQLite.
- Really strong support across multiple platforms (we have clients for most of the major web frameworks)
- Efficiency, sure we have lots of RAM on servers nowdays but on some platforms it's constrained and if you don't have to burn it, we'd just rather not.
- When we started mapping this out, we ended up with something that looked like a JSON format that we were adding indexes to....and then we were re-inventing SQLite.