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Willison prototypes SQLite document history as zstd-compressed JSON arrays: 20.4 MB of revisions down to 80.3 KB
Simon Willison published an experiment storing full document revision history in a single SQLite BLOB column as a Zstandard-compressed JSON array of all prior versions, with timestamps kept in a separate column. 1,000 simulated revisions produced 20.4 MB of raw revision text that compressed to 80.3 KB — roughly 250:1, because consecutive revisions of the same document are almost entirely redundant. To keep row sizes bounded he chunks the history across multiple rows capped at 128 revisions or 3MB of uncompressed JSON each. The code was generated by GPT-5.6 Sol Pro from a spoken description — a small but useful demonstration of voice-to-prototype as a workflow.
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