tl;dr: The author built SELF, a prototype executable format that replaces ELF with a SQLite database, using binfmt_misc to launch it via a custom interpreter that maps segments and resolves symbols through SQL queries. Individual binaries are ~2x larger due to b-tree overhead, but packing an entire userland (723 executables, 400 libraries) into one database yields 611 MiB vs 644 MiB of ELF files, with tools like `strip`, `ldd`, and `LD_PRELOAD` reducing to SQL transactions and joins. Code is available at fzakaria/selfdb.