Probably going to get some winces for this but I do everything with flat files. Maybe my data aren't massive enough, but I mean I can do the relational thing by just having these metadata in some column, and returning rows that contain my desired information in these columns. Even if the file were too big to fit into memory one could just subset chunks of it and chew through. All this can be done with no dependencies, just base libraries of a lot of languages.

sorry about that, I do love Beatles!

They've been improving that recently:

2026-04-09 (3.53.0) - "Enhance ALTER TABLE to permit adding and removing NOT NULL and CHECK constraints"

I use my own sqlite-utils CLI/Python library to work around these limitations: https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#...