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

[Bernd Vogelgesang]

Am 26.11.2012, 23:13 Uhr, schrieb Alister Hood  
<Alister.Hood at synergine.com>:

>> 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.

Giving my 2 cents as "user": Postgis is too complex/abstract to set up and  
use for noobs, shape files suck, spatialite seems to be the perfect mix  
(portability)(if there only would be understandable documentations and at  
least SOME examples how to use it in a workflow).

In my experience, spatialite is much faster and more reliable with bigger  
datasets. Had to classify 30.000 polygons via field calculator and did  
this in multiple steps. As a shape file, qgis crashed, froze, took ages,  
while in spatialite it just worked smoothly.

You just should not use Qspatialite to import shapes. I nearly gave up  
upon spatialite, when i figured out that i had to use the Spatialite GUI  
instead and this was fast as hell.
So at the moment, you have to work with Spatialite GUI to import shapes,  
then use Qspaltialite to push them into QGIS and repeat that shit on every  
major action (ftools e.g.). Not really convenient, so its no wonder that  
not many people seem to use it so far.
Would really love to see much more spatialite support in QGIS. And when i  
grow up, i will learn this sql- stuff and everything will be fine ;)

greetz
bernd


>
> Regards,
> Alister
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