4 Load Data

Let’s add some data to our database:

  1. Click on sfbay.sqlite in the Providers Panel to select it in the list.
  2. Click on the Table menu, and select Import Layer/File to open the Import Vector Layer dialog.
  3. For the Input, click the button with the three dots (ellipsis mark) to browse your files. Select the Flowlines.shp file and click Open. If you’re familiar with shapefiles, you might wonder, “Do I need to select all of the files that comprise a shapefile?” No, you just need to select the .shp and QGIS will know to look for the rest.
  4. In the Table box, type flowlines for the name of our new table - all lowercase
  5. In the Options section, check the Source SRID box. Use the “Select SRID” button to open the projection dialog. In the filter box at the top, type 3310 to narrow down the options. Select “NAD83 / California Albers EPSG:3310” for the Coordinate Reference System because the projection for this data is California Albers (NAD38) which has the SRID of 3310.
  6. NOTE: There are many other options here that you may find useful later. In particular, the Encoding option allows you to tell QGIS which character encoding you are using. Did your characters show up as rectangles or other unreadable characters? Reimport your data and specify your character encoding.

You should see a pop-up that says “Import was successful.” Click OK.

You can repeat this process to add the other two datasets. Call the WBDHU8_Points_SF table centroids and WBDHU8_SF table watersheds.

Congratulations! You now have a database with files related to the San Francisco Bay’s watersheds!