The best way to load your database is directly from the shapefiles themselves (available via the Richmond GIS office FTP site).
Steps
- Download the data
- Create your PostGIS database
- Extract the shapefiles
- Generate SQL for shapefiles
- Load data into the database
Refer to the GIS office FTP link above.
First ensure that you have PostgreSQL and PosGIS installed. On a Mac the
simplest way to do this is install the latest version of
Postgres.app
which is a bundled version of PostgreSQL 9.3 with PostGIS 2.0. On
Windows you should be able to use the binary installers for
PostgreSQL and
PostGIS. If you're on Linux then
you should be able to use your native package manager just fine (e.g.
apt-get install postgresql postgis).
The scripts herein and elsewhere in the project refer to a database called "richmond" so let's create a matching database. Assuming your system user account has the right privileges, run the following commands from your command prompt:
psql -c "CREATE DATABASE richmond;"
psql -d richmond -c "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis WITH SCHEMA public;"
Now you should have a PostGIS ready database.
Why name it 'richmond' when it is just geographic data? Because this database should later include other data, for which the GIS data will provide a useful foundation for further analysis.
Unzip the files...
The included shell scripts 'sqlgen.sh' and 'load.sh' can be used to genearate the SQL for loading the data and loading the data, respectively. The need to be copied to the directory where your shapefiles reside (sorry) and executed from there.
./sqlgen.sh
./load.sh
Again, loading the data with the script as-is requires that your system user account has the requisite database privileges.
This is an effort to codify what I did on intially getting the data. I may have inadvertently skipped or changed a step, so if there are any problems let me know (ben@wellfire.co).