New project - Importing data

I need a database with some geographic data. There are many sources around, some of them provide the SQL queries to populate such a database (http://code.google.com/p/worlddb/), some involve a script (https://github.com/geraldb/world.db), some are just shapefiles. I’ve decided to use directly the shapefiles, for maximum flexibility and to understand better the various file formats.

GDAL is the most common suite of tools used to manage shapefiles; unfortunately I’ve had some troubles setting up the MySQL connector and after spending half a day on it I’ve decided to give up and do everything manually using the RGeo::Shapefile::Reader, which turned out being very simple and user friendly.

Sources