Importing Shape Files into MySQL

Posted by Wally Atkins on July 14, 2010 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

I recently was interested in getting some shapefile information quickly into a MySQL database. It seems like it should be a relatively simple task but you never know until you try, right? Well, thanks to the wonderful GDAL there is a great command that should be shared with the world:

ogr2ogr -f "MySQL" MySQL:"geospatial,user=user,host=localhost,password=password" -lco engine=MYISAM shapes.shp

It’s a thing of beauty! One little command line entry will take the entire contents of the shape file and push it into a MySQL database with the geometry. The only catch that I have run into so far was needing to increase a setting for increasing the MySQL allowed packet size. To change that just edit the /etc/my.inf file to include something like:

max_allowed_packet=100M

Works like a dream.