yes you are right, in the article the author thinks he just realized something special "elf is a data base", but no, is not, its just a structured piece of data "a database", sqlite file format is also that, the only diference between Elf and sqlite file is that the latter has a a better "client" to inspect it.

I understand what you are saying, but that's not close to the original meaning of the term, or at least not what I have seen in early papers. Originally the idea was a single central repository of information which would be used to run a company: so similar to systems like SAP, but obviously a lot simpler and with the assumption of running on a mainframe. It didn't refer to a particular choice of data structure, but to the way that multiple business processes would share information.

Like the Unicode Character Database, which is a series of text files in similar-seeming but disparate formats (it now also has an XML representation):

https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/