[GRASS5] Re: question about sqlite

[Glynn Clements]

Michael Barton wrote:

> DBF is a widely used, standard format--in spite of being old and klunky. It
> can be imported or read by a wide variety of other programs (e.g., Open
> Office, Excel, Access, Filemaker). It is also the standard table format for
> ESRI, MapInfo, and Idrisi. It would be very inconvenient to drop it.

I wasn't suggesting dropping support for DBF as an *external* data
format, but for the DBF driver. IMHO, external DBF files should
imported with e.g. v.in.dbf, not manually inserted into the GRASS
database.

Daniel Calvelo Aros wrote:

> What I think Glynn had in mind is not accessing DBF files through a
> GRASS DBMI driver but rather convert them to SQLite (and back,
> eventually) and not bother anymore about parsers, SQL and the lot.

That's exactly what I had in mind.

> I'd say yes, let's build converters between DBF and sqlite3 files (and also
> between txt/csv formats and sqlite3) and drop sqlp, since the equivalent in
> SQLite is much better and powerful. As an aside, deprecate DBF and propose
> sqlite3 as the default storage format, starting from (say) 6.2.
> 
> That would mean having GRASS depend on sqlite, of course.

Well, it would depend upon having at least one database backend,
whether that's SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL or ODBC.

AFAICT, the only advantage to the DBF driver is that we bundle it with
GRASS. SQLite does essentially the same thing (i.e. both are
server-less, zero-configuration DBMSs) but does a better job of it.

If it's essential to bundle at least one database backend, we could
always bundle SQLite (the code is public domain).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>