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GeoPackage 101
What?
The basics of GIS file formats are covered quite well by Wikipedia. This includes the difference between raster and vector types, together with all the common formats both old and new. An important distinction for this project is whether or not they are proprietary. GeoPackage is An Open Format for Geospatial Information. For a formal definition see the GeoPackage Encoding Standard.
Why?
Anyone who has programmed geospatial software has eventually come to a conclusion about data formats: there is only one truly de facto standard for geospatial data, the shape file, and the shape file sucks. See Beyond the Shapefile with File Geodatabase and GeoPackage and Why you should use GeoPackage instead of Shapefile in this regard.
How?
For an excellent introduction see Getting Started With GeoPackage at the parent website.
LIVE Services uses the GPKG – GeoPackage vector driver from GDAL to load the whole OS Boundary-Line (GB) product into the PostgreSQL database. This constitutes a massive saving in development and maintenance time.
Project
In QGIS 3.8 they have added the ability to store QGIS projects directly inside GeoPackage files! This means that you can create a totally self-contained GeoPackage which embeds a QGIS Project AND all the data used by the project. QGIS – Save to GeoPackage Project shows you how. Why not have a go?
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