[GRASS-dev] sqlite and grass64

[Michael Barton]

On Jan 11, 2008, at 10:00 AM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:20:37 +0100
> From: "Markus Neteler" <neteler at osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] sqlite and grass64
> To: "Martin Landa" <landa.martin at gmail.com>
> Cc: GRASS developers list <grass-dev at grass.itc.it>
> Message-ID:
> 	<86782b610801110620k635bc1f9m75aaed390d9393d8 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Jan 11, 2008 2:26 PM, Martin Landa <landa.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi devs,
>>
>> I would like to ask you for your opinion... to use sqlite as default
>> db driver for grass64 (instead of dbf). What do you think?
>
> Yes, that would be very good. AFAIK:
>
> Functionality
> - it does all the DBF driver does and way more
>
> Portability
> - works on all common operating systems
>
> Installation efforts:
> - despite the base installation, zero maintenance
>
> Markus

AFAICT, SQLite has considerably more functionality than our current  
dbf driver. I like it for a lot of reasons. A couple issues to  
consider, however.

dbf is a widely recognized file format that can be read or imported by  
very many other applications directly. While the SQLite database  
engine can export into several interchange format, the native SQLite  
file format is much less widely read by other applications.

Related to this, GRASS is very weak in interactive data management  
capabilities. This constantly comes up when I demo GRASS. A saving  
grace in this situation is the portability of the dbf attribute table  
format. I can tell people that they can easily manage the attribute  
tables in OpenOffice, for example. This is not the case with SQLite.

Martin Landa is crafting a very nice interactive data manager for the  
wxPython GUI. When fully implemented, this will make the 2nd issue  
much less important. But this is not the default GUI yet. It would  
also be nice to be able to export an SQLite table to dbf format   
(along with delimited text formats supported) from within GRASS to  
deal with the 1st issue.

Michael

______________________________
Michael Barton, Professor
Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
School of Human Diversity & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287-2402
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voice: 480-965-6262; fax: 480-965-7671
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