Geoparquet

A PSA on r/gis last month pointed out that Apache Parquet now has native geospatial types and that GDAL’s GeoParquet driver is mature, ESRI ships read/write support, and QGIS treats it as a first-class format. The thread had the same energy as the old “stop using shapefiles” threads, except this time the alternative is not a marginal incremental improvement. GeoParquet is a different shape of file that solves problems shapefiles never could. ...

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. ...