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I'm looking for a means to take a rather large shapefile and split it out into separate, smaller shapefiles based on number of features. So for example, if I have a file with 1 million features, subset it out into smaller files of 100k features each.

I know how to grid a shapefile and subset into smaller files, but I don't want to grid it as I want to preserve the original feature geometry (e.g. gridding polygons will ruin the geometry).

Does anyone know how this can be done with QGIS?

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Is there a field in the attribute table you can use to group the smaller sets by? If so, you can use ogr2ogr's -sql switch to specify a query that will pull just those records and export them to their own shapefile.

Boston GIS's site has a nice ogr2ogr cheatsheet if you need an example to work from

http://www.bostongis.com/?content_name=ogr_cheatsheet

That said, with a million records I would stuff that sucker into a PostGIS database. It would almost certainly be faster to work with, especially if those features are complex.

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If you just want to sample X number of features from a vector file:

  • QGIS has a function in the vector menu "Research tools" called Random selection within subjects. Open this tool and calculate a subset containing any number or percentage of X features within your vector layer.

If you want to totally separate your polygon into equal parts:

  • The way to go would be to create a separate attribute field with an index and attach it to your vectors attribute table. I would create the column with a R or a python-script. Afterwards execute the Dissolve-Tool from your vector menu and choose your newly created column.

Of course there might be an easier solution if you use PostGIS.

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If you don't have postgis available and don't need multi-user access then load the shapefile into a spatialite db, the speed is amazing and even that many records would be a breeze.

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