How to work with zipped database without extraction in Python?

I'm developing a "3d model library" python script for Autodesk Maya. As this script is going to be massively distributed (I work in animation studio) I would like to store the library contents in archive with password so only the script itself can read it. The library file should be a simple zip file with this file structure:

"library.zip" contains a "database.db" (SQL database) file and "assets/" folder with 3d models.

So the question is: How can I extract the database.db to memory and then connect to it? I saw some threads relatively close to my question, and the most common advise was to use StringIO, but unfortunately I couldn't make it work.