Depending on the differences between your shapefile schemas, you may be able to use the INHERITS facility in PostgreSQL. An example here might be you make point observations of different types of phenomena, but at heart these are all some kind of observation.
If your shapefile schemas are wildly different then that may imply you are trying to put stuff that is wildly different together and that might indicate you should re-think your plan a bit. Extending my example above, you probably wouldn't want to combine "plans" with "observations", even if you could figure out how, because later on you might want to compare planned performance with observed performance and spatial overlay or similar keys are the way to do that, working from two different physical themes. Todd Fagin wrote: > > Greetings PostGIS-ers, > > > > I have another newbie question for you. > > > > I have multiple shapefiles I want to load into PostGIS as a single > layer. However, these shapefiles have different schemas. I know that > shp2pgsql has the -a option for appending However, the tables must > have the same schema, right? > > > > I have come up with a convoluted way to do this and it works. > However, I have feeling that someone much smarter than I has already > found a more elegant solution to this. > > > > Here is what I have done: > > > > 1. Convert each shapefile to SQL using shp2pgsql; this is especially > important since it creates the the_geom field > > 2. Run the SQL script for the shapefile that has the schema I will use > > 3. Edit the remaining .sql files generated for each shapefile by > shp2pgsql, removing everything but the INSERT statements and editing > the fields to map to the appropriate fields in the existing table > (this is the part that could be cumbersome, hence looking for a more > elegant solution). > > 4. Run the edited SQL scripts for each of the remaining shapefiles. > > > > Thanks, > > > > Todd > > > > Todd Fagin > > > > Coordinate Solutions, Inc. > > 2804 NW 18th St. > > Oklahoma City, OK 73107 > > 405.740.4324 (voice) > > 904.471.5548 (fax) > > www.coordinatesolutions.com > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > postgis-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users > -- Regards, Chris Hermansen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] tel+1.604.714.2878 · fax+1.604.733.0631 · mob+1.778.232.0644 Timberline Natural Resource Group · http://www.timberline.ca 401 · 958 West 8th Avenue · Vancouver BC · Canada · V5Z 1E5 _______________________________________________ postgis-users mailing list [email protected] http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
