[gdal-dev] Esri REST PBF support

[Nyall Dawson]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2025 at 08:04, Craig de Stigter via gdal-dev <
gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> Hi folks
>
> OGR has support for ESRI FeatureService endpoints via the ESRI JSON
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'm hoping this wasn't your intention, but to paraphrase your request:

"I'm happy to rely on systems which steal from the work of GDAL developers.
But those systems aren't good enough yet, so I'd like some unpaid help from
the GDAL developers to finish my work."

😭

Nyall





>
> 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
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> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
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