This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
The results of this research have been applied to SQLite already and were released in v3.38.0.
tl;dr: Bloom filters were great because: minimal memory overhead, goes well with SQLite’s simple implementation, and worked within existing query engine.