SpatiaLite

SpatiaLite
Developer(s) Alessandro Furieri
Initial release March 21, 2008
Stable release 4.2.0 / July 25, 2014
Operating system GNU/Linux, MS-Windows, Mac OS X, POSIX compliant systems
Type Geographic information system
License MPL GPL LGPL tri-license
Website http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite

SpatiaLite is a spatial extension to SQLite, providing vector geodatabase functionality. It is similar to PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, and SQL Server with spatial extensions, although SQLite/SpatiaLite aren't based on client-server architecture: they adopt a simpler personal architecture. i.e. the whole SQL engine is directly embedded within the application itself: a complete database simply is an ordinary file which can be freely copied (or even deleted) and transferred from one computer/OS to a different one without any special precaution.

SpatiaLite extends SQLite's existing spatial support to cover the OGC's SFS specification.[1] It isn't necessary to use SpatiaLite to manage spatial data in SQLite, which has its own implementation of R-tree indexes and geometry types, but in order to do advanced spatial queries and support multiple map projections, SpatiaLite is needed. SpatiaLite is provided natively for Linux and Windows as a software library as well several utilities that incorporate the SpatiaLite library. These utilities include command line tools that extend SQLite's own with spatial macros, a graphical GUI for manipulating Spatialite databases and their data, and a simple desktop GIS tool for browsing data.

Being a single binary file, SpatiaLite is also being used as a GIS vector format to exchange geospatial data.

Software that supports SpatiaLite

Standards

SpatiaLite supports several open standards from the OGC and has been listed as a reference implementation for the proposed GeoPackage standard.[18]

External links

References