Query Vector Data Using a WHERE Clause – ogrinfo

The following is an excerpt from the book: Geospatial Power Tools – Open Source GDAL/OGR Command Line Tools by Tyler Mitchell.  The book is a comprehensive manual as well as a guide to typical data processing workflows, such as the following short sample…

Use SQL Query Syntax with ogrinfo

Use a SQL-style -where clause option to return only the features that meet the expression. In this case, only return the populated places features that meet the criteria of having NAME = ’Shanghai’:

Building on the above, you can also query across all available layers, using the -al option and removing the specific layer name. Keep the same -where syntax and it will try to use it on each layer. In cases where a layer does not have the specific attribute, it will tell you, but will continue to process the other layers:

NOTE: More recent versions of ogrinfo appear to not support this and will likely give FAILURE messages instead.

---

Geospatial Power Tools is 350 pages long – 100 of those pages cover these kinds of workflow topic examples.  Each copy includes a complete (edited!) set of the GDAL/OGR command line documentation as well as the following topics/examples:

Workflow Table of Contents

1. Report Raster Information – gdalinfo 23
2. Web Services – Retrieving Rasters (WMS) 29
3. Report Vector Information – ogrinfo 35
4. Web Services – Retrieving Vectors (WFS) 45
5. Translate Rasters – gdal_translate 49
6. Translate Vectors – ogr2ogr 63
7. Transform Rasters – gdalwarp 71
8. Create Raster Overviews – gdaladdo 75
9. Create Tile Map Structure – gdal2tiles 79
10. MapServer Raster Tileindex – gdaltindex 85
11. MapServer Vector Tileindex – ogrtindex 89
12. Virtual Raster Format – gdalbuildvrt 93
13. Virtual Vector Format – ogr2vrt 97
14. Raster Mosaics – gdal_merge 107