Several databases I've been looking at recently implement a virtual machine internally to perform the respective data reads and writes. For an example, check out this article on SQLite's virtual machine they call the 'VDBE'. I'm curious as to what the benefits of such an architecture are. I would assume performance is one but why would a virtual machine like this run faster? In fact, it seems to be that this extra layer could cause it to run slower. So perhaps it's for security? Or portability? Anyway, just curious about this.