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Are New Geospatial Formats Useful?

Tom MacWright explores whether newer geo-data formats, like FlatGeobuf, Zarr, GeoParquet, Arrow, or COGs, are useful for applications making frequent updates to the data.

The post dives deep into some of the characteristics of these data formats, including compression, random access, and random writes, and concludes that they are optimised for reading data and that the benefits for writes are limited:

I like these new formats and I’ll support them, but do they benefit a usecase like Placemark ? If you’re on the web, and have data that you expect to update pretty often, are there wins to be had with new geospatial formats? I’m not sure.

Flatgeobuf: Implementer’s Guide

Flatgeobuf is a relatively new binary format to encode geographic vector data. Unlike vector tiles, Flatgeobuf is a lossless encoding format, which is streamable and enables random feature access.

Horace Williams wrote a comprehensive overview of what goes into a Flatgeobuf file and how it is structured internally.