Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
engine and data objects are all embedded within one file and are not based on a
client-server architecture. This makes its use more straightforward as it does not
require the installation and adminstration overhead that is commonly required for
some PostGIS and other server based spatial databases. However, it also means that
Spatialite tends to be more suited to environments where it will be used for sin-
gle user access rather than in distributed, multi-user environments. It is also noted
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that Spatialite is optimized for use on physical drives of local filesystems rather
than in networked environments that rely on NFS and Samba as it does not support
file locking very well. Nonetheless, for quick tasks and everyday use, the format
offers significant advantages over legacy, multi-file formats such as ESRI Shape-
files with the associated DBF files. Spatialite is also interoperable and can be used
on Linux, Unix, MS Windows and Mac operating systems. It implements the OGC
Simple Features Access Standard and provides SQL functions that can be used with
ST_Geometry types supported by the GEOS library
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; R-Tree Spatial Indexing is
available in versions of SQLite 3.6 and above. Many of the functions in Spatialite
are based on the Minimum Bounding Rectangle (MBR). It is worth noting that an
equivalent “Spatialite” for raster data is librasterlite,
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which is also built on the
SQLite database.
The installation of Spatialite is straightforward and is described in the
AppendixB.5. In addition to the Spatialite application, binaries exist for a
spatial-
itegui
, which is the Spatialite graphical user interface that can be used to view
data and access much of the Spatialite functionality through menus and buttons.
Spatialite also provides its own command line interface. The following would be
automatically printed within your terminal when you issue the command:
spatialite myfile.sqlite
SpatiaLite version ..: 2.4.0 Supported Extensions:
- 'VirtualShape' [direct Shapefile access]
- 'VirtualDbf' [direct DBF access]
- 'VirtualText' [direct CSV/TXT access]
- 'VirtualNetwork' [Dijkstra shortest path]
- 'RTree' [Spatial Index - R*Tree]
- 'MbrCache' [Spatial Index - MBR cache]
- 'VirtualFDO' [FDO-OGR interoperability]
- 'SpatiaLite' [Spatial SQL - OGC]
PROJ.4 version ......: Rel. 4.7.1, 23 September 2009
GEOS version ........: 3.2.0-CAPI-1.6.0
SQLite version ......: 3.7.13
================ FDO-OGR Spatial Metadata detected
→
===============
created VirtualFDO table 'fdo_subset_ile_de_france'
created VirtualFDO table 'fdo_forest_select'
Accessing these fdo_XX tables you can take full advantage of
FDO-OGR auto-wrapping facility
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