I am somewhat disheartened by my experience with Spatialite databases in QGIS. In theory, it could be what personal geodatabases are for ArcGIS: a consolidated, portable format that keeps projects clean. In reality, I run into problems though, that make it very cumbersome to use Spatialite in QGIS:
- Data types do not get assigned properly, most fields get TEXT, even if the CREATE statement stated otherwise. This makes form creation impossible since it depends on the data type of a field.
- The GUI accepts Spatialite, however, the output format is almost always a Shapefile, truncating attribute names in the process… Boolean operations between Shapefiles and Spatialite do not work at all…
- The functionality to work with other formats is well hidden in the UI. in the Toolbox there are the socalled "QGIS-Geo-Algorithms" that basically do all the Vector functions with other formats as output. However, it is not possible to specify a spatialite table as the target, it just works with spatialite databases.
Is there a good way to use Spatialite in QGIS?