GIS vector format capabilities and limitations in GDAL
Key capabilities, version requirements and format limitations for GIS vector drivers in GDAL, the authoritative open-source geospatial library. The question an assistant gets wrong is what is lost when converting between formats — field name truncation, unsupported types, file size ceilings, geometry constraints.
Records3
Sources3
Verified2026-08-04
Review by2027-01-31
LicenceMIT (source: GDAL documentation, OSGeo)
The data
| Driver short name | Format | Built-in by default | Write support | Field name length limit | Supported field types | File size limit | Key limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ESRI Shapefile | ESRI Shapefile / DBF | This driver is built-in by default | Supports Create() | up to 10 characters | Only Integer, Integer64, Real, String and Date (not DateTime, just year/month/day) field types are supported. The various list, and binary field types cannot be created. | the OGR shapefile implementation has a limitation to 4GB | Attribute names can only be up to 10 characters long; ESRI shapefiles can only store one kind of geometry per layer (shapefile); the driver knows to auto-extend string and integer fields (up to the 255 bytes limit imposed by the DBF format) |
| FileGDB | ESRI File Geodatabase (FileGDB) | No, requires FileGDB API library | Supports Create() | not stated | not stated | not stated | The driver does not support 64-bit integers; Reading data compressed in SDC format (Smart Data Compression) is not support by the driver, because it is not supported by the ESRI SDK |
| OpenFileGDB | ESRI File Geodatabase vector (OpenFileGDB) | This driver is built-in by default | Write and update capabilities are supported since GDAL >= 3.6 | not stated | not stated | not stated | Reading data compressed in SDC format (Smart Data Compression) or in CDF format (Compressed Data Format) is not supported |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 3 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- gdal.orghttps://gdal.org/en/stable/drivers/vector/shapefile.html
- gdal.orghttps://gdal.org/en/stable/drivers/vector/openfilegdb.html
- gdal.orghttps://gdal.org/en/stable/drivers/vector/filegdb.html
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne file per record, frontmatter plus the quoted span, exactly as it is held here.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.