.. _vector.pg:

PostgreSQL / PostGIS
====================

.. shortname:: PostgreSQL

.. build_dependencies:: PostgreSQL client library (libpq)

This driver implements support for access to spatial tables in
PostgreSQL extended with the `PostGIS <http://postgis.net/>`__ spatial
data support. Some support exists in the driver for use with PostgreSQL
without PostGIS but with less functionalities.

This driver requires a connection to a Postgres database. If you want to
prepare a SQL dump to inject it later into a Postgres database, you can
instead use the :ref:`PostgreSQL SQL Dump driver <vector.pgdump>`.

You can find additional information on the driver in the :ref:`Advanced OGR
PostgreSQL driver Information <vector.pg_advanced>` page.

Driver capabilities
-------------------

.. supports_create::

.. supports_georeferencing::

Connecting to a database
------------------------

| To connect to a Postgres datasource, use a connection string
  specifying the database name, with additional parameters as necessary

   ::

      PG:dbname=databasename

   *or*

   ::

      PG:"dbname='databasename' host='addr' port='5432' user='x' password='y'"

   *or* starting with GDAL 3.1:

   ::

      PG:service=servicename

| It's also possible to omit the database name and connect to a
  *default* database, with the same name as the user name.
| **Note**: We use PQconnectdb() to make the connection, so any other
  options and defaults that would apply to it, apply to the name here
  (refer to the documentation of the PostgreSQL server. Here for
  `PostgreSQL
  8.4 <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/libpq-connect.html>`__).
  The PG: prefix is used to mark the name as a postgres connection
  string.

Geometry columns
----------------

If the *geometry_columns* table exists (i.e. PostGIS is enabled for the
accessed database), then all tables and named views listed in the
*geometry_columns* table will be treated as OGR layers. Otherwise
(PostGIS disabled for the accessed database), all regular user tables
and named views will be treated as layers.

Starting with GDAL 1.7.0, the driver also supports the
`geography <http://postgis.net/docs/manual-1.5/ch04.html#PostGIS_Geography>`__
column type introduced in PostGIS 1.5.

Starting with GDAL 2.0, the driver also supports reading and writing the
following non-linear geometry types :CIRCULARSTRING, COMPOUNDCURVE,
CURVEPOLYGON, MULTICURVE and MULTISURFACE

SQL statements
--------------

The PostgreSQL driver passes SQL statements directly to PostgreSQL by
default, rather than evaluating them internally when using the
ExecuteSQL() call on the OGRDataSource, or the -sql command option to
ogr2ogr. Attribute query expressions are also passed directly through to
PostgreSQL. It's also possible to request the ogr Pg driver to handle
SQL commands with the :ref:`OGR SQL <ogr_sql_dialect>` engine, by
passing **"OGRSQL"** string to the ExecuteSQL() method, as the name of
the SQL dialect.

The PostgreSQL driver in OGR supports the
OGRDataSource::StartTransaction(), OGRDataSource::CommitTransaction()
and OGRDataSource::RollbackTransaction() calls in the normal SQL sense.

Creation Issues
---------------

The PostgreSQL driver does not support creation of new datasets (a
database within PostgreSQL), but it does allow creation of new layers
within an existing database.

As mentioned above the type system is impoverished, and many OGR types
are not appropriately mapped into PostgreSQL.

If the database has PostGIS types loaded (i.e. the geometry type), newly
created layers will be created with the PostGIS Geometry type. Otherwise
they will use OID.

By default it is assumed that text being sent to Postgres is in the
UTF-8 encoding. This is fine for plain ASCII, but can result in errors
for extended characters (ASCII 155+, LATIN1, etc). While OGR provides no
direct control over this, you can set the PGCLIENTENCODING environment
variable to indicate the format being provided. For instance, if your
text is LATIN1 you could set the environment variable to LATIN1 before
using OGR and input would be assumed to be LATIN1 instead of UTF-8. An
alternate way of setting the client encoding is to issue the following
SQL command with ExecuteSQL() : "SET client_encoding TO encoding_name"
where encoding_name is LATIN1, etc. Errors can be caught by enclosing
this command with a CPLPushErrorHandler()/CPLPopErrorHandler() pair.

Dataset open options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(GDAL >= 2.0)

-  **DBNAME**\ =string: Database name.
-  **PORT**\ =integer: Port.
-  **USER**\ =string: User name.
-  **PASSWORD**\ =string: Password.
-  **HOST**\ =string: Server hostname.
-  **DBNAME**\ =string: Database name.
-  **SERVICE**\ =string: Service name (GDAL >= 3.1)
-  **ACTIVE_SCHEMA**\ =string: Active schema.
-  **SCHEMAS**\ =string: Restricted sets of schemas to explore (comma
   separated).
-  **TABLES**\ =string: Restricted set of tables to list (comma
   separated).
-  **LIST_ALL_TABLES**\ =YES/NO: This may be "YES" to force all tables,
   including non-spatial ones, to be listed.
-  **PRELUDE_STATEMENTS**\ =string (GDAL >= 2.1). SQL statement(s) to
   send on the PostgreSQL client connection before any other ones. In
   case of several statement, they must be separated with the
   semi-column (;) sign. The driver will specifically recognize BEGIN as
   the first statement to avoid emitting BEGIN/COMMIT itself. This
   option may be useful when using the driver with pg_bouncer in
   transaction pooling, e.g. 'BEGIN; SET LOCAL statement_timeout TO
   "1h";'
-  **CLOSING_STATEMENTS**\ =string (GDAL >= 2.1). SQL statement(s) to
   send on the PostgreSQL client connection after any other ones. In
   case of several statement, they must be separated with the
   semi-column (;) sign. With the above example value for
   PRELUDE_STATEMENTS, the appropriate CLOSING_STATEMENTS would be
   "COMMIT".

Dataset Creation Options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

None

Layer Creation Options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-  **GEOM_TYPE**: The GEOM_TYPE layer creation option can be set to one
   of "geometry", "geography" (PostGIS >= 1.5), "BYTEA" or "OID" to
   force the type of geometry used for a table. For a PostGIS database,
   "geometry" is the default value.
-  **OVERWRITE**: This may be "YES" to force an existing layer of the
   desired name to be destroyed before creating the requested layer.
-  **LAUNDER**: This may be "YES" to force new fields created on this
   layer to have their field names "laundered" into a form more
   compatible with PostgreSQL. This converts to lower case and converts
   some special characters like "-" and "#" to "_". If "NO" exact names
   are preserved. The default value is "YES". If enabled the table
   (layer) name will also be laundered.
-  **PRECISION**: This may be "YES" to force new fields created on this
   layer to try and represent the width and precision information, if
   available using NUMERIC(width,precision) or CHAR(width) types. If
   "NO" then the types FLOAT8, INTEGER and VARCHAR will be used instead.
   The default is "YES".
-  **DIM={2,3,XYM,XYZM}**: Control the dimension of the layer. Important
   to set to 2 for 2D layers with PostGIS 1.0+ as it has constraints on
   the geometry dimension during loading.
-  **GEOMETRY_NAME**: Set name of geometry column in new table. If
   omitted it defaults to *wkb_geometry* for GEOM_TYPE=geometry, or
   *the_geog* for GEOM_TYPE=geography.
-  **SCHEMA**: Set name of schema for new table. Using the same layer
   name in different schemas is supported, but not in the public schema
   and others. Note that using the -overwrite option of ogr2ogr and -lco
   SCHEMA= option at the same time will not work, as the ogr2ogr utility
   will not understand that the existing layer must be destroyed in the
   specified schema. Use the -nln option of ogr2ogr instead, or better
   the active_schema connection string. See below example.
-  **SPATIAL_INDEX**\ =NONE/GIST/SPGIST/BRIN (starting with GDAL 2.4) or
   YES/NO for earlier versions and backward compatibility: Set to GIST
   (GDAL >=2.4, or YES for earlier versions) by default. Creates a
   spatial index (GiST) on the geometry column to speed up queries (Has
   effect only when PostGIS is available). Set to NONE (GDAL >= 2.4, or
   FALSE for earlier verions) to disable. BRIN is only available with
   PostgreSQL >= 9.4 and PostGIS >= 2.3. SPGIST is only available with
   PostgreSQL >= 11 and PostGIS >= 2.5
-  **TEMPORARY**: (From GDAL 1.8.0) Set to OFF by default. Creates a
   temporary table instead of a permanent one.
-  **UNLOGGED**: (From GDAL 2.0) Set to OFF by default. Whether to
   create the table as a unlogged one. Unlogged tables are only
   supported since PostgreSQL 9.1, and GiST indexes used for spatial
   indexing since PostgreSQL 9.3.
-  **NONE_AS_UNKNOWN**: (From GDAL 1.8.1) Can bet set to TRUE to force
   non-spatial layers (wkbNone) to be created as spatial tables of type
   GEOMETRY (wkbUnknown), which was the behaviour prior to GDAL 1.8.0.
   Defaults to NO, in which case a regular table is created and not
   recorded in the PostGIS geometry_columns table.
-  **FID**: (From GDAL 1.9.0) Name of the FID column to create. Defaults
   to 'ogc_fid'.
-  **FID64**: (From GDAL 2.0) This may be "TRUE" to create a FID column
   that can support 64 bit identifiers. The default value is "FALSE".
-  **EXTRACT_SCHEMA_FROM_LAYER_NAME**: (From GDAL 1.9.0) Can be set to
   NO to avoid considering the dot character as the separator between
   the schema and the table name. Defaults to YES.
-  **COLUMN_TYPES**: (From GDAL 1.10) A list of strings of format
   field_name=pg_field_type (separated by comma) that should be use when
   CreateField() is invoked on them. This will override the default
   choice that OGR would have made. This can for example be used to
   create a column of type
   `HSTORE <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/hstore.html>`__.
-  **DESCRIPTION** (From GDAL 2.1) Description string to put in the
   pg_description system table. On reading, if such a description is
   found, it is exposed in the DESCRIPTION metadata item. The
   description can also be written with SetMetadataItem("DESCRIPTION",
   description_string). Descriptions are preserved by default by
   ogr2ogr, unless the -nomd option is used.

Configuration Options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are a variety of `Configuration
Options <http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ConfigOptions>`__ which help
control the behavior of this driver.

-  **PG_USE_COPY**: This may be "YES" for using COPY for inserting data
   to Postgresql. COPY is significantly faster than INSERT. Starting
   with GDAL 2.0, COPY is used by default when inserting from a table
   that has just been created.
-  **PGSQL_OGR_FID**: Set name of primary key instead of 'ogc_fid'. Only
   used when opening a layer whose primary key cannot be autodetected.
   Ignored by CreateLayer() that uses the FID creation option.
-  **PG_USE_BASE64**: (GDAL >= 1.8.0) If set to "YES", geometries will
   be fetched as BASE64 encoded EWKB instead of canonical HEX encoded
   EWKB. This reduces the amount of data to be transferred from 2 N to
   1.333 N, where N is the size of EWKB data. However, it might be a bit
   slower than fetching in canonical form when the client and the server
   are on the same machine, so the default is NO.
-  **OGR_TRUNCATE**: (GDAL >= 1.11) If set to "YES", the content of the
   table will be first erased with the SQL TRUNCATE command before
   inserting the first feature. This is an alternative to using the
   -overwrite flag of ogr2ogr, that avoids views based on the table to
   be destroyed. Typical use case: "ogr2ogr -append PG:dbname=foo
   abc.shp --config OGR_TRUNCATE YES".

Examples
~~~~~~~~

-  Simple translation of a shapefile into PostgreSQL. The table 'abc'
   will be created with the features from abc.shp and attributes from
   abc.dbf. The database instance (warmerda) must already exist, and the
   table abc must not already exist.

   ::

      % ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL PG:dbname=warmerda abc.shp

-  This second example loads a political boundaries layer from VPF (via
   the :ref:`OGDI driver <vector.ogdi>`), and renames the layer from the
   cryptic OGDI layer name to something more sensible. If an existing
   table of the desired name exists it is overwritten.

   ::

      % ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL PG:dbname=warmerda \
              gltp:/vrf/usr4/mpp1/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia \
              -lco OVERWRITE=yes -nln polbndl_bnd 'polbndl@bnd(*)_line'

- Export a single Postgres table to GeoPackage:

   ::

     ogr2ogr \
       -f GPKG output.gpkg \
       PG:dbname="my_database" "my_table"

- Export many Postgres tables to GeoPackage:

   ::

     ogr2ogr \
       -f GPKG output.gpkg \
       PG:'dbname=my_database tables=table_1,table_3'

- Export a whole Postgres database to GeoPackage:

   ::

     ogr2ogr \
       -f GPKG output.gpkg \
       PG:dbname=my_database


- Load a single layer GeoPackage into Postgres:

   ::

     ogr2ogr \
       -f "PostgreSQL" PG:dbname="my_database" \
       input.gpkg \
       -nln "name_of_new_table"


-  In this example we merge tiger line data from two different
   directories of tiger files into one table. Note that the second
   invocation uses -append and no OVERWRITE=yes.

   ::

      % ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL PG:dbname=warmerda tiger_michigan \
           -lco OVERWRITE=yes CompleteChain
      % ogr2ogr -update -append -f PostgreSQL PG:dbname=warmerda tiger_ohio \
           CompleteChain

-  This example shows using ogrinfo to evaluate an SQL query statement
   within PostgreSQL. More sophisticated PostGIS specific queries may
   also be used via the -sql commandline switch to ogrinfo.

   ::

      ogrinfo -ro PG:dbname=warmerda -sql "SELECT pop_1994 from canada where province_name = 'Alberta'"

-  This example shows using ogrinfo to list PostgreSQL/PostGIS layers on
   a different host.

   ::

      ogrinfo -ro PG:'host=myserver.velocet.ca user=postgres dbname=warmerda'

-  This example shows use of PRELUDE_STATEMENTS and CLOSING_STATEMENTS
   as destination open options of ogr2ogr.

   ::

      ogrinfo "pg:dbname=mydb" poly.shp -doo "PRELUDE_STATEMENTS=BEGIN; SET LOCAL statement_timeout TO '1h';" -doo CLOSING_STATEMENTS=COMMIT

FAQs
----

-  **Why can't I see my tables? PostGIS is installed and I have data**
   You must have permissions on all tables you want to read *and*
   geometry_columns and spatial_ref_sys.
   Misleading behavior may follow without an error message if you do not
   have permissions to these tables. Permission issues on
   geometry_columns and/or spatial_ref_sys tables can be generally
   confirmed if you can see the tables by setting the configuration
   option PG_LIST_ALL_TABLES to YES. (e.g. ogrinfo --config
   PG_LIST_ALL_TABLES YES PG:xxxxx)

See Also
--------

-  :ref:`Advanced OGR PostgreSQL driver Information <vector.pg_advanced>`
-  :ref:`OGR PostgreSQL SQL Dump driver Page <vector.pgdump>`
-  `PostgreSQL Home Page <http://www.postgresql.org/>`__
-  `PostGIS <http://postgis.net/>`__
-  `PostGIS / OGR Wiki Examples
   Page <http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/UsersWikiOGR>`__

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   :hidden:

   pg_advanced
