Tips

• Attribute data stored with a shapefile (the .dbf file) can only use column names shorter than 14 characters. If you try and export a postGIS table that has column names longer than 14 characters, they will be truncated when converted to a shapefile.
• If column is postGIS is defined as numeric, ogr2ogr will not correctly interpret the values in this column: i.e. floating point values less than 1 will be truncated to 0. In order to avoid this problem always define your colums as double precision or float. For dynamically generated tables, cast affected columns to a defined numeric precision: select colum_a::numeric(7,3) where '7' refers to the total number of digits in the column, and '3' refers to the number of decimal places.

Geometry and attribute data to GIS file format

 
GDAL/OGR tools

• Import
   
  
  ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" PG:'dbname=ssurgo_combined user=xxxx password=xxxx host=postgis.server.edu' input_file.shp
• Export
   
  
  ogr2ogr output_file.shp PG:'dbname=ssurgo_combined user=xxxx password=xxxx host=postgis.server.edu' tablename

   
  Note that tables must be correctly 'registered' in the geometry_columns table for this to work:
  

  INSERT INTO geometry_columns VALUES ('','public','tablename','wkb_geometry',2,SRID,'geomtype');

 
Where tablename is your newly created table, SRID is the SRID (spatial reference ID) for the geometry in this table, and geomtype is the type of geometry: POINT, LINE, POLYGON, etc.

Attribute data to text format

 
CSV format, via psql client

 
Tabular data to HTML format, via psql client See output below:

 
HTML output from psql

(10 rows)