[pdal] Proposal: Remove SQLite reader/writer for PDAL 2.0

[Jed Frechette]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2019 at 12:32 PM Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co> wrote:
> I think TileDB is a better choice for this task at the moment than SQLite with the upcoming PDAL 2.0 release. Norman Barker is supporting it through PDAL's support venues, and I believe his firm is available for paid support opportunities. It is going to perform much better and it supports streaming. The SQLite drivers were a proof of concept that I developed based on our experience with both the Oracle and pgpointcloud drivers, and while it is interesting for database storage of point clouds, it has some significant downsides.

Thanks for the good advice. I had looked in to TileDB and it seems
really interesting but given how general it is I wasn't sure how well
the implementation played with PDAL. It's good to hear that it is at
least a candidate for a nativeish container format.

The biggest challenge I see with it for the use case I outlined is
that it is a compiled Python module. Unfortunately, we're mostly stuck
on Windows and even with the help of conda, keeping various modules
working together is a pain. Trying to do it while adding in Python
version mismatches and trying to match whatever compiler was used to
build the embedded interpreter pretty quickly negates any ease of use
advantages Python might have offered so it's probably time to look at
other ways of extending the applications in question.

Or just use text files ;-) Most of our data sets are only several
hundred million points, so although far from ideal it's certainly
manageable.

Best,


--
Jed Frechette