[postgis-users] Re: How to access PostGIS directly from R (rgdal)

[Tim Keitt]

 <pcreso <at> pcreso.com> writes:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> This may be better suited to the R or GDAL lists, but I don't frequent those,
so I'll try here first.
> 
> We have PostGIS databases we are looking to use behind a WMS/WFS server & as a
generic spatial data
> repository for my organisation.
> 
> We have a lot of R users, & I'd like to be able to have them able to access
the topo data (coastlines, roads,
> rivers, lakes, cities, etc) for use with some of our R mapping functionality.
> 
> I had hoped rgdal would support this, but having installed it, it does not
support Postgres/PostGIS
> databases as an OGR source. We could use something like shapefiles as an
intermediate format if there is
> nothing better, but I'm hoping for some pointers in how to enable Postgis
access directly.

I believe readOGR will retrieve PostGIS tables using dsn="PG:dbname=...". The
support is not very good (no query support or layer creation options), but it
should work.

THK

> 
> We can use ODBC, via dbi, etc, but this means reinventing ways of interpreting
geometry datatype data.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>    Brent Wood
>