Am 26.11.2012, 23:13 Uhr, schrieb Alister Hood <[email protected]>:

Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:35:24 +0000
From: Barry Rowlingson <[email protected]>
...
>
> 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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