# FlatGeobuf

Added in version 3.1.

Driver short name

FlatGeobuf

Driver built-in by default

This driver is built-in by default

This driver implements read/write support for access to features encoded in FlatGeobuf format, a performant binary encoding for geographic data based on flatbuffers that can hold a collection of Simple Features.

## Driver capabilities

Supports Create()

This driver supports the `GDALDriver::Create()` operation

Supports Georeferencing

This driver supports georeferencing

Supports VirtualIO

This driver supports virtual I/O operations (/vsimem/, etc.)

## Multi layer support

A single .fgb file only contains one single layer. For multiple layer support, it is possible to put several .fgb files in a directory, and use that directory name as the connection string.

On creation, passing a filename without a .fgb suffix will instruct the driver to create a directory of that name, and create layers as .fgb files in that directory.

Starting with GDAL 3.9, metadata set at the layer level will be written in the FlatGeobuf header, and retrieved on reading as layer metadata.

## Open options

Open options can be specified in command-line tools using the syntax `-oo <NAME>=<VALUE>` or by providing the appropriate arguments to `GDALOpenEx()` (C) or `gdal.OpenEx` (Python). The following open options are supported:

- VERIFY_BUFFERS=[YES​/​NO]: Defaults to `YES`. Set to YES to verify buffers when reading. This can provide some protection for invalid/corrupt data with a performance trade off.

## Dataset Creation Options

None

## Layer Creation Options

Layer creation options can be specified in command-line tools using the syntax `-lco <NAME>=<VALUE>` or by providing the appropriate arguments to `GDALDatasetCreateLayer()` (C) or `Dataset.CreateLayer` (Python). The following layer creation options are supported:

- SPATIAL_INDEX=[YES​/​NO]: Defaults to `YES`. Set to YES to create a spatial index.

- TEMPORARY_DIR=<path>: Path to an existing directory where temporary files should be created. Only used if `SPATIAL_INDEX=YES`. If not specified, the directory of the output file will be used for regular filenames. For other VSI file systems, the temporary directory will be the one decided by the `CPLGenerateTempFilename()` function. "/vsimem/" can be used for in-memory temporary files.

- TITLE=<string>: (GDAL >= 3.9) Dataset title (should be relatively short)

- DESCRIPTION=<string>: (GDAL >= 3.9) Dataset description (intended for free form long text)

## Creation Issues

- Currently, NULL geometries are not supported with `SPATIAL_INDEX=YES`.

  More background and discussion on this issue at

- The creation of the packet Hilbert R-Tree requires an amount of RAM which is at least the number of features times 83 bytes.

## Examples

- Simple translation of a single shapefile into a FlatGeobuf file. The file 'filename.fgb' will be created with the features from abc.shp and attributes from abc.dbf. The file `filename.fgb` must not already exist, as it will be created.

      ogr2ogr -f FlatGeobuf filename.fgb abc.shp

- Conversion of a Geopackage file with multiple layers:

      ogr2ogr -f FlatGeobuf my_fgb_dataset input.gpkg

## See Also

- FlatGeobuf at GitHub