[Aust-NZ] Portable geospatial file formats (was: Live CDs for the FOSS4G conference and DebianGIS)

[Robert Coup]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Rob:
> > There's no reason we couldn't collectively get Spatialite into
> > GDAL/OGR, GRASS, uDig, QGIS, and the others...
>
> Once GDAL/OGR has support for SpatiaLite, other things fall into place
> quickly. Would SpatiaLite scale to the level of massive country-wide
> datasets in the same way as PostGIS? You can read about some SQLite
> downsides here:
>  http://gdal.osgeo.org/ogr/drv_sqlite.html


I don't see any particular downsides there that aren't just OGR's support
(ie. no spatialite+indexing)... ? The 'no datatypes' thing doesn't apply in
the same way to SQLite v3 as it did to v2 (more at
http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html).

I'm not suggesting it as a replacement for PostGIS, but as a replacement for
Shapefiles - portable, single file, compact, efficient, relational, "just
works", etc. While someone non-technical might fire up QGIS and open a
spatialite db, its a completely different thing to get postgis running and a
dataset loaded, and thats before getting QGIS to connect to it. If you're
using large datasets then a DB server solution will be necessary - you'll
have the same problems today trying to run everything off Shapefiles - but
that level is simply not required for many people and problem classes. And
SQLite should kick Shapefiles in nearly every metric by a significant
amount.

As you said, getting it into OGR is the first step - but it'd be great for
the desktop apps to pick up and run with it as well, not just as another
import/export option.

Rob :)
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