Database guides

Shapefiles (ESRI)

Updated 2026-08-01 · 3 min read

Pick the .shp and AddisDB finds its siblings, decodes the geometry, and plots it on the Map view — no GIS install required.

A shapefile is not one file — it is a set that has to travel together. AddisDB resolves the siblings for you: choose the .shp and it picks up the .dbf, .shx and .prj sitting next to it, then decodes the geometry so it can go on the map.

Who it is for

The ESRI shapefile has been the lingua franca of GIS for three decades. Government agencies, surveyors, utilities and planning departments publish in it, and vast archives of geographic data exist in no other format.

Its age shows in specific ways: attribute names are capped at ten characters, the format has a 2 GB ceiling, text encoding is ambiguous unless a .cpg file says otherwise, and there is no single-file version. Those constraints are the format, not the reader.

Use it when you have been handed GIS data — parcel boundaries, census tracts, utility networks, flood zones, election districts — and you want to see and query it without installing a full desktop GIS.

What the file set looks like

Keep these together in one folder. If the .dbf is missing you lose the attributes; if the .shx is missing the geometry cannot be indexed.

  • .shp — the geometry itself (required)
  • .dbf — the attribute table, one record per shape (required)
  • .shx — the shape index (required)
  • .prj — the coordinate reference system (strongly recommended)
  • .cpg — the character encoding of the .dbf, when it is not the default

Getting a file

  1. Government open-data portals, the US Census TIGER/Line archive, and Natural Earth all publish shapefiles.
  2. They usually arrive as a .zip — unzip it and keep the whole set in one folder.
  3. Do not rename one file of the set without renaming the others; the siblings are matched by name.
  4. Check for a .prj. Without one, the coordinate system is a guess, and a projected dataset will not sit where you expect on a map.

Open it in AddisDB

  1. New Connection → Files → Map → Shapefile.
  2. Choose the .shp file. AddisDB resolves the .dbf, .shx and .prj beside it automatically.
  3. Name the connection, then Save.

Seeing it on the map

Query the layer and a Map tab appears next to Table, Text, Chart and JSON. Your parcels, tracts or routes are drawn on an interactive map, with a live basemap switcher for moving between street, satellite and plain backgrounds.

Shapefile polygons rendered on the AddisDB Map view over a street basemap.

If the features land somewhere implausible — the middle of the Atlantic is the classic — the dataset is almost certainly in a projected coordinate system rather than longitude and latitude. Converting it once with ogr2ogr is easier than fighting it every time.

# Reproject to WGS 84 and get a single-file result while you are at it
ogr2ogr -f GPKG -t_srs EPSG:4326 parcels.gpkg parcels.shp

What else AddisDB gives you

  • The attribute table as real SQL columns — filter, group and count the features before mapping them.
  • The Chart view for aggregating attributes, and the JSON tab for raw feature geometry.
  • Notebooks and AI chat grounded in the layer’s real columns.
  • ⌘K search across every connection, files included.
  • A file set that is only ever read — nothing is written back.