Since this is dBase file format, does this mean shapefiles can do more than alternative formats, like geoJSON?
I have exactly the right link to answer this: http://switchfromshapefile.org
Funny enough, two popular contenders are built on SQLite.
Re:Looking Back at Postgres
by Stratoscope on Monday June 15, 2020 @08:01PM
(#23534483)
That's an interesting question. In practice I've found it to be the other way around - especially the ten character limit on .dbx column names. If your incoming data has a field named "Population in 2010" you have to map it to something shorter like "PopIn2010". Not a big deal but it gets annoying.
A shapefile is actually a collection of files, typically using the same filename with different extensions.
There is a .shp file containing the actual geographical "shapes": points, lines, polygons, etc.
Alongside it is a .dbf (dBASE) file with information about each shape. For example, if you have a list of cities, each city may have a boundary polygon (or multipolygon) in the .shp file, and the city name, population, and other demographics in the .dbf file.
The other required file is a .shx containing indices into the .shp file for faster navigation through it.
There may be other files as well; a common one is the .prj file that describes the projection used in this shapefile.
This collection of files, foo.shp, foo.dbf, foo.shx, etc. is referred to together as a "shapefile".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile
Bringing us full circle, GIS programmers and users often import a shapefile into PostGIS for processing. And PostGIS is, of course, a GIS extension to PostgreSQL!
https://postgis.net/