I plowed the 40 GiB database file into sqlite_zstd_vfs [1] which reduced it 75% to 10 GiB. This plug-in also supports HTTP access [2] in the spirit of phiresky's, however, I don't have a WebAssembly build of mine yet, so it's a library for desktop/command-line apps for now. You can try it out on Linux or macOS x86-64:

  pip3 install genomicsqlite
  genomicsqlite https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/mlin-public/static.wiki/en.zstd.db "select text from wiki_articles where title = 'SQLite'"

("genomicsqlite" is the CLI for my Genomics Extension [3], which is built around these Zstandard compression & web layers.)

[1] https://github.com/mlin/sqlite_zstd_vfs

[2] https://github.com/mlin/sqlite_web_vfs

[3] https://mlin.github.io/GenomicSQLite

EDITS: I expanded on this comment in this gist https://gist.github.com/mlin/ee20d7c5156baf9b12518961f36590c...

If you want to download the whole en.zstd.db, then please kindly get it from zenodo (which doesn't support HTTP range requests, but is free): https://zenodo.org/record/5149677