Mount an archive and write to (and read from) it on-the-fly on Linux

Is there a tool available that supports mounting of an archive into a folder and on-the-fly writing to it?

I've tried avfs (which seems to support read-only) and mountarchive (which seems to support writing, but it only seems to put the written data into the archive when I sudo umount.

My main use-case right now is that I have an SQLite database that has highly redundant and also somewhat irregular data. I don't wish to change the schema and de-normalize it by hand, and so I am looking into automatic solutions. E.g. deflating it by putting it into an archive and reading and writing to it on the fly.

That said, I'm not yet sure this is a good way to achieve SQLite compression; there might be others that I don't know about -- I haven't used SQLite much yet. But even if it isn't the best way, I'd still be curious to know of a good read+write archive mounting solution that I might use in a different situation.

Edit: Since someone is voting to close this question on these grounds:

Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

I can phrase it like this: I have an SQLite database (accessed programmatically) with highly redundant data. De-normalization by hand might be time consuming, because much of the data is varchar where some parts of the strings overlap with other rows' contents, others don't. How can I reduce the size of this database? Putting it into a mounted archive is one thing I can think of, and I've tried to do that with avfs and mountarchive so far without success.