[QGIS-Developer] GeoPackage - where are we -where do we go

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 5/8/20 3:13 PM, Tobias Wendorff wrote:
> Am 08.05.2020 um 15:10 schrieb Andreas Neumann:
>> To me, this is not a downside, but a big, big plus! Fewer mess on the
>> file system.
> My students and co-workers start to save each layer in a new GPKG, so I
> don't have a benefit all ;)
> 
>> And it is the whole point  of a Geopackage, to package many data sets
>> into one file, so it can be easily shared.
> Just ZIP or TAR them ;)

Thanks for raising this Matthias! But I think we should not try to
create a silver bullet here. One should use gpkg where it fit's (and
that is apparently NOT in networked environment, that is where db's are
a better fit?).

About Tobias' flatgeobuf: instead of a shp/gpkg file alternative, would
this not be a very good candidate to store our intermediate processing
steps in (which was shp, not shure what it is now?)?

May I second the above mentioned good thing about gpkg: that you can
have more (related) sets of data in one file, that you can create joins
in these to create views, that you can save styles and projects in it
etc etc

The fact at most people use some programs/formats to do things they
equally can do with a txt/csv file does not make a more advanced format
a bad format :-)

Today I actually hit an issue in which selection first seem not to work:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/36291
from which my conclusion is: views are cool but be careful with primary
keys!

So in the case of gpkg we should probably have a dialog like we have for
Postgis/Oracle in which you can define a Primary Key, etc etc?

Which brings me to: we should handle gpkg as actual databases and not as
simple files? Maybe we/ogc are actually trying to mixup concepts:
databases vs simple files?

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde