Just $2000? That's spare change! (Though looking at their licensing terms etc., it's not a bad offer at all, if one has a need for this sort of thing.)

As for my original problem, it's true that performance would likely suffer, though not if the DB was decompressed into memory and accessed there, then. That said I've just bitten the bullet and extracted the DB to a temporary file, which (all things considered) is the easiest and most portable solution.