My general objective is to find a dataset format that, 1. can contain both vectors and single band rasters, and 2. can work in both QGIS and Pro. GeoPackage and Spatialite are the two formats I am considering, but I am having issues with both. Any advice on this point?
The specific issue that I have with the GeoPackage is that, based on internet research and my experiments with ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, and GDAL, I am convinced that a raster in a GeoPackage can only be displayed as a 4 band RGB+Alpha channel image in ArcGIS. Can anyone confirm that this is indeed still a limitation with ArcGIS Pro 3.1? If that is the case, is there a work around?
The details are that in ArcGIS Pro, I can create a GeoPackage with Create SQLite Database (with GeoPackage as the Spatial Type) and then populate it with a single band raster (.tif) using Add Raster to GeoPackage. The result is always an RGB image of the raster, rather than the actual values of the raster.
If I create a GeoPackage and populate it with the 'Raw data' of the single band raster (same exact .tif as above) in GDAL or QGIS, the result is exactly what I want in QGIS (in Sptialite-GUI as well). However, in ArcGIS Catalog, just the name of the GeoPackage will appear. If I click that name to see the contents, Catalog won't confess that there is a raster. In Spatialite-GUI, I can access the GeoPackage's gpkg_contents table and change the data_type field from '2d-gridded-coverage' to 'tiles' (what the data_type is when I create a GeoPackage in ArcGIS Pro). Then the raster will show up in Catalog and I can pull it into an ArcGIS Pro Map, but - again - only as a 4 band RGB+Alpha channel image.
My experiments like this corroborate what I have found on the internet, which strongly suggest that ArcGIS will only show a raster in a GeoPackage as an RGB. Again, it would be helpful if someone can confirm this limitation and also tell me if there is a work around.
Cheers
