[QGIS-Developer] Regular vs spatialite sqlite database

[a.furieri at lqt.it]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 13:31:10 +0200, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
> See this older blog post for some differences between Spatialite and
> GeoPackage: [0] The author is one of the Geopackage guys, maybe 
> Sandro
> (or others) wants to add arguments against it.
>
> The reason I promote GeoPackage nowadays, is that I think open 
> standards
> are the way to go...
>

Hi Richard,

SpatiaLite and GeoPackage are only apparently similar
because both them are based on SQLite, but they strongly
differ and cannot be assumed to be a mutual replacement.

SpatiaLite should be more correctly considered as a
possible "personal" light-weight replacement to PostGIS,
because both them offer the same Spatial SQL support
(although they completely differ on their respective
architectures and internal implementations).

choosing the one or the other mainly depends on the
specific goals of your project:

- if you just need a modern standard exchange format
   for spatial data, and you aren't planning to support
   Spatial SQL processing, then GeoPackage is obviously
   your  best choice.
   Surely better than the nowadays obsolete Shapefile.

- if you need instead a simple and light-weight Spatial
   DBMS fully supporting SQL spatial data analysis and
   processing SpatiaLite has no rivals in this arena.
   and it could be a decent exchange format as well.

- finally, if you absolutely require a Spatial DBMS
   supporting many concurrent users, then you
   necessarily have to consider using PostGIS (or any
   other client/server Spatial DBMS).

bye Sandro