[gdal-dev] Esri REST PBF support

[Craig de Stigter]

Hi folks

OGR has support for ESRI FeatureService endpoints via the ESRI JSON
<https://gdal.org/en/stable/drivers/vector/esrijson.html> driver.
I am wondering if there would be interest in adding PBF support to that
driver, so that we could ingest the more efficient PBF versions of those
endpoints.

As far as I can tell, this is *different* and unrelated to the OSM PBF
format that GDAL already supports.

Feature servers we have come across that support PBF seem to return query
results much faster and more reliably in PBF rather than JSON.

We have some Python code internally (not using GDAL) that handles the PBF,
but it performs poorly due to being computation code in Python. I am
investigating ways to speed it up using other languages. As part of this I
may be in a position to convert it to C++ and contribute it to GDAL, if
there is interest. I am no C++ developer but am becoming proficient with
Claude Code :)

I would lean towards implementing the PBF support as a by-default
optimisation on the existing ESRIJSON driver, if the server advertises
support for PBF - with a config option to force use of JSON if necessary. A
separate driver would be an alternative but seems unnecessary since the PBF
structure is quite similar to the JSON structure (the main difference is
that geometries are encoded more efficiently)

I haven't given much time towards investigating how to do this in GDAL, but
would appreciate any tips or discussion.

-- 
Regards,
Craig

Platform Engineer
Koordinates
koordinates.com / @koordinates <https://twitter.com/koordinates>
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