[cwmma]

Shapefiles, the legacy multifile file format for geospatial stuff that is still an incredibly important interchange format since it has basically universal support is built around DBF files.

So despite it being an incredibly old file format it's still used constantly in the GIS world and it's probably not going to go away because while it's not a good format, it does basically everything at to at least a mediocre level which can't be said for any of the newer formats that tend to do a few things great but other things terribly.

Like Geojson is great for interchange but you can't really do in place edits or even in place seeking from disk, shapefile can.

Sqlite allows great editing and seeking but you can't use that in a browser without doing something complicated like compiling the sqlite binary to js or wasm.

[bigbuppo]

Of course the modern replacement is just sqlite.