Three ways to smuggle SQLite into Nix (fzakaria.com)

The WASM extension me like. Would be great to get that into mainline.

It seems that you could just compile the data into the WASM blob. Then use a more optimized query engine than sqlite. This should be very fast to compile (most of the WASM is just a byte buffer, the code is just a few binary searches and some result encoding). The downside is that you need to recompile to update the repo, but I don't think that should be particularly expensive.

If this much JSON could fit in a microcontroller’s memory (7.5MB in text), and it’s a performance issue, maybe it’s worth upgrading the JSON parser?

(author) If you have questions, happy to try and answer some.

Just convert it to a binary data structure suitable for this purpose and use the old-fashioned bsearch. It's so simple that you wouldn't even need SQLite.