[QGIS-Developer] GeoPackage - where are we -where do we go

[Tobias Wendorff]

Am 08.05.2020 um 11:30 schrieb Matthias Kuhn:
>
> I do not want to trigger a evangelical discussion here. I'd like to see
> where we are and what we can reasonably do to have a default file format
> which can be recommended with no bad feelings.

Two downsides of GPKG, which I've experienced with many users, who
worked with Shapefiles in the past:

1. A GPKG can contain multiple layers, but has one filename only. This
confuses many users. They're expecting single files, like
"houses_poly.gpkg" and "houses_point.gpkg". When they only see
"houses.gpkg", they think they're missing anything. From the normal
Windows Explorer (don't know about Nautilus etc.), you also cannot watch
inside the GPKG file to check its content. It would be nice to make
Windows parse GPKG's/sqlite3's metadata.

2. As pointed out in the past, a big downside of GPKG or sqlite3 is the
huge bloat. I often have single table GPKGs, which are 12 GiB. When
compressing them with zstd, I can get it down to 3 GiB or even less in
about no time.

VACUUM doesn't help here and isn't reachable easily using a button in
QGIS. Seems like there's much empty space in the db scheme. Perhaps
anyone can explain this?