View attribute (/field) names of a geopackage table without opening the whole file

Question

I have a large geopackage file (15gb) for which I'd like to see the attribute (/field/column) names. Is this possible without loading the whole file?

Edit: It would be ideal if there was a command line tool that allowed you to do this. Something like just seeing the 'head' of the file

Answer 1

Use ogrinfo, e.g.:

ogrinfo -so <path/to/file.gpkg> <layer_name>

Answer 2

One cumbersome way to do this would be to convert to (something like) geojson using ogr2ogr, and then look at the head of the file. E.g.

ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON"  <geojson_file_name> <geopackage_file_name>

Then once that's done, look at the top lines:

head -100 <geojson_file_name>

This would show the field names as geojson features.

This did the trick for me, but there's probably a format that would make more sense to convert to than geojson. And a more efficient way of doing things that doesn't require converting the geopackage to something else.

Answer 3

DBManager in QGIS can connect to the GeoPackage and show data structure as well as preview the data. Layers within the package can also be deleted.