Creating a spatial database in QGIS is a simple operation. QGIS supports PostGIS, SpatiaLite, MSSQL, SQL Anywhere, and Oracle Spatial databases. We will cover SpatiaLite, an open source project that is cross-platform, simple, and lightweight, and provides quite a bit of functionality. SpatiaLite is a spatial database management system (DBMS) built on top of SQLite, a lightweight personal DBMS.
Note
SpatiaLite (and thus, SQLite) is built on a personal architecture, which makes installation and management virtually nonexistent. The trade-off, however, is that it neither does a good job of supporting multiple concurrent connections nor does it support a client-server architecture. For a more complex DBMS, PostGIS is an excellent open source option.
We will create a new SpatiaLite database that we will use for the remaining exercises in this chapter; to do this, perform the following steps:
Open QGIS Desktop and open the Browser panel. If the Browser panel is missing...