Import

Our workshop data (see here) is actually given as a collection of single shapefiles. In order to enhance the performance while read and write processes and enable writing at all (shapefiles can't be manipulated via WFS-T after they have been published), we will import the given data into our own PostgreSQL database entity we just created.

Import country polygons

Open a new terminal window and navigate to the materials directory:
```
  $ cd ~/materials
```
List all directories in the current folder with:
```
  $ ls -l
```
You should be able to see the folders natural_earth and osm_mongolia. If you inspect them further on, you will see that each folder contains a wide list of single shapefiles, but for the moment we want to use a small portion of them to import into the database only. Therefore we are going to start with importing a shapefile involving worldwide country polygons.
Navigate to directory materials/natural_earth/10m_cultural and check if you can find a file named ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp.
To import the shapefile we will use the command line tool shp2pgsql. The following command will transform the input shapefile ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp with the input encoding LATIN1 and input projection 4326 to a SQL statement which will fill the data in a new table tbl_countries in schema geodata. After execution the output of shp2pgsql is directly piped to psql which will run the SQL output against the workshop database. You can easily copy the command below into the terminal window and execute it subsequently.
```
  $ shp2pgsql \
    -s 4326 \
    -W LATIN1 \
    -I ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp \
    geodata.tbl_countries | \
  psql \
    -h localhost \
    -p 5432 \
    -U momo \
    -W \
    -d db_momo_ws
```
After the successful execution of the above command (re-)open pgAdmin III, mark the database server momo-workshop in tree view and click Refresh the selected object to refresh the database/table list and expand the tree to Databases ❭ db_momo_ws ❭ Schemas ❭ geodata ❭ Tables (if not already happened) as shown below:

Select table tbl_countries and click View the data in the selected object to open the data view for the imported table as shown below:

Congratulations! You've successfully imported a shapefile into PostgreSQL that can now easily be published through the GeoServer instance!