Re: OT - load a shp file

On Wednesday, December 01, 2010 01:13:52 am Lee Hachadoorian wrote:
> John,
>
> Would probably be useful to see the results of the command, but a couple
> of things are immediately obvious.
>
> First, Postgres requires identifiers to start with a letter or
> underscore. You are attempting to create a table named 2008_us_county,
> which is not a legal identifier. Also, unless you want this in the
> public schema, make sure to use the schema-qualified table name.
>
> Second, the docs specify that the shapefile be passed in without the
> .shp extension.
>
> Third, since you're not specifying the database explicitly, make sure
> that the default makes sense (psql assumes a default of your user name
> or reads it from the PGDATABASE environment variable). The examples in
> the shp2pgsql docs all explicitly specify a target database with, e.g.
> … | psql -d my_db
>
> If you fix all of this and it still isn't working, I would direct the
> output to a file, look at it to make sure it makes sense, then try to
> pass the file to psql.
>
> If you would prefer, there are also a couple of GUIs that can control
> shp2pgsql. I've had success with the SPIT (Shapefile to PostGIS Import
> Tool) plugin for Quantum GIS (http://qgis.org/). For Windows only you
> can use the Shp2PgSQL Graphical Loader (a plugin for pgAdmin III)
> available at http://postgis.refractions.net/download/windows/.
>
> Finally, a better list for PostGIS support is
> postgis-users@postgis.refractions.net.
>
> --Lee
>
> On 12/01/2010 01:06 AM, John Fabiani wrote:
> > Hi,
> > How do I load a Census shp file into an exist database?  I believe I have
> > postGIS install and now I want to load the US counties shp file.
> >
> > the following does not appear to work
> > shp2pgsql -s 4269 -I -W latin1 tl_2008_us_county.shp 2008_us_county |
> > psql
> >
> > Plus I don't know what it does!
> >
> > Johnf

thanks for the help.  Your response already has taught me a few things and I
haven't even tried to fix the issues.

Johnf