Geopackage ready for daily use ?

Is the widely pushed OGC Geopackage (GPKG)(http://www.geopackage.org/) ready for daily use – also as a replacement for the good old Shapefile as an exchange-format ? While QGIS already supports Geopackage (including direct editing) quite well for some time, the format starts to grow up in the ESRI environment. Some good news with ArcGIS Pro 1.4 …

ArcGIS Pro 1.4 news

The good news: It’s no longer necessary to use some Python-code to create a new GPKG/SQLite database in ArcGIS Pro 1.4 – and support for raster-data is now also available !

How does the created Geopackage-data work and perform cross-platform ? Some impressions.

  • ArcGIS Pro 1.4 options for creating a new SQLite/Geopackage database (geoprocessing tools): Supports ST_geometry, Geopackage, SpatiaLite !

    Create new SQLite database
  • The copy features function (geoprocessing) allows to import/export features classes from the Geopackage (tested with feature classes from Oracle/SDE, FileGDB).
Copy features to Geopackage
  • ArcGIS Pro 1.4 – Raster to GPKG: Converting a raster to Geopackage worked well, but AG Pro 1.4 was not able to load the raster as raster (just as table). Reported to ESRI. QGIS had no problems loading it. So interop seems to work.

    ArcGIS Pro 1.4 news
  • Testing interoperability with QGIS 2.18 – it worked well ! All vector layers generated by AG Pro worked without any problems.

  • Creating and editing a new feature class in this GPKG with QGIS and testing interop with AG Pro 1.4: Worked 🙂
QGIS created polygons (natively in GPKG edited) in AG Pro

Up-to-date GI Software (in my case AG Pro 1.4 and QGIS 2.18/2.99) already works well with OGC Geopackage and with it’s support for vector- and rasterdata the Geopackage can be very helpful for exchanging data or exporting data for “offline-use”. The open-data portal of the city of Zurich already provides geodata in GPKG format.