Comment by karmakaze

The summary says:

> SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().

> The performance difference arises (we believe) because when working from an SQLite database, the open() and close() system calls are invoked only once, whereas open() and close() are invoked once for each blob when using blobs stored in individual files. It appears that the overhead of calling open() and close() is greater than the overhead of using the database.

This should come as a surprise to no one. The rest of the article is only of interest in terms of how benchmarking is done, if that's your thing.