[GRASS-dev] Re: grass-dev Digest, Vol 21, Issue 24

[Michael Barton]

On Jan 11, 2008, at 1:23 PM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Message: 7
> Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:23:16 +0600
> From: Ivan Shmakov <ivan at theory.asu.ru>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] sqlite and grass64
> To: grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> Cc: Ivan Shmakov <oneingray at gmail.com>
> Message-ID: <m2fxx4jemj.fsf at cherry.siamics.int>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>>>>>> Michael Barton <michael.barton at asu.edu> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> 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.
>
> 	Not for the general side of the problem, but Google shows quite
> 	a few links when queried for ``sqlite openoffice''.
>
> [...]

I followed those out recently and found that 1) OO has an SQLite  
driver that is under development but not ready and perhaps not active  
development; 2) currently, the only way to access SQLite via OO is via  
ODBC. This requires commercial drivers on the Mac and possibly Windows.

Michael