[Qgis-developer] Get rid of Shapefiles ! Go SpatiaLite !

[Alister Hood]

> Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:35:24 +0000
> From: Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk>
> ...
> >
> > I am very frustrated by the limitations of the Shapefile format, and much
> > more by the quasi obligation to use it as the default vector format in QGIS.
> > I mean for non power users who do not use PostGIS or spatialite.
> 
>  Why is spatialite seen as a "power user" option when ESRI users have
> been using something similar for years? Its just a file, you connect
> to it, you add spatial data to it.

Well, I think it IS a "power user" option as long as things output only to shapefile, after which the user needs to perform an extra step to import to spatialite.  This discussion on abstraction is good to see.

Users won't perform the extra step unless they have a motivation to do so.  Personally I have only used spatialite a couple of times, when I needed to perform special queries.  And these queries are also very much for "power users" - the user isn't confronted by any documentation telling them about the cool stuff they can do (and how to do it), so people are most likely to do it only after googling to solve a particular problem.

If you don't need to run a special query or something, does spatialite have major benefits?  Do these need some publicity?
Things like the length of field names seem pretty minor to me...

And maybe this is a little off topic, but does anyone else have trouble with the implementation of spatialite in qgis?
In my experience it is very slow (takes 6 hours to save as or import a layer to spatialite, when ogr2ogr takes less than 5 minutes), and tends to be accompanied by a series of frightening error/warning messages.

Regards,
Alister