Geospatial data loading

Although we now have a geodatabase, it only provides value and insights for your organization when populated with coordinates and attribute data. PostgreSQL has rich geospatial data support through the PostGIS extension. Both are open source, providing a powerful and cost-effective means to enable geospatial data storage analysis.

The most important part of establishing tables for geospatial data is to create a column that stores the geometry data type. Several different methods and tools can be used to simplify spatial data tables and indexes. One popular open source approach is to use the shp2pgsql.exe command-line utility. This handy tool, managed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), extracts information from the multiple files that make up a shapefile package. The contents are then converted into SQL statements that can be applied directly to your database. The content of the statements can be altered by the command-line arguments. There...