alt Hacker NewsCouldn't they simply switch to zip files? Those have an index and allow opening individual files within the archive without reading the whole thing.
Also, I don't understand how using XML makes for a brittle schema and how SQL would solve it. If clients choke on unexpected XML elements, they could also do a "SELECT *" in SQL and choke on unexpected columns. And the problem with people adding different attributes seems like just the thing XML namespaces was designed for.
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A ZIP file with solid encryption (i.e., the archive is encrypted as a single whole) has all of the same tradeoffs as a KDBX file as far as incremental updates are concerned.
A ZIP file with incremental encryption (i.e., each file is individually encrypted as a separate item) has its own problems. Notably: the file names are exposed (though this can be mitigated), the file metadata is not authenticated, and the central directory is not authenticated. So sure, you can read that index, but you can't trust it, so what good is it doing? Also, to support incremental updates, you'd either have to keep all the old versions of a file around, or else remove them and end up rewriting most/all of the archive anyway. It's frankly just not a very good format.
It's a single XML file. Zip sounds like the worst of both worlds. You would need a new schema that had individual files at some level (probably at the "row level.") The article mentions SQLCipher which allows encrypting individual values separately with different keys. Using different keys for different parts of a kdbx sounds ridiculous, but I could totally imagine each row being encrypted with a compound key - a database-level key and a row-level key, or using PKI with a hardware token so that you don't need to decrypt the whole row to read a single field, and a passive observer with access to the machine's memory can't gain access to secrets the user didn't explicitly request.