GeoJSON Is an Interchange Format, Not a Working Format — What GIS Teams Actually Use at Scale
GeoJSON keeps showing up in places it shouldn’t. Someone drops a 2 GB .geojson into a processing pipeline, the script that used to run in 20 seconds runs for eight minutes, and the team spends a Thursday wondering whether the problem is their query planner, their RAM, or their patience. The problem is the format. GeoJSON is a perfectly good interchange format — human-readable, one-spec wonder, works everywhere a text editor opens. It’s a terrible working format as soon as your dataset has more than a few hundred thousand features. This post is about when to stop loading GeoJSON directly and what to convert to instead, based on what teams handling real-scale data actually reach for. ...