Problems with dividing multipolygons into polygons

Question

I have a shapefile with countries boundaries downloaded from here and I am trying to upload it to PostGIS database with ogr2ogr. This file contains features of polygon and multipolygon types and because of that I cannot upload these features in one column.

I tried to divide the multipolygons into several polygons with QGIS and with python+fiona. But some countries got cut and have wrong boundaries.

What may cause that and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

To import the Shapefile to PostGIS:

ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" PG:"host=localhost user=user dbname=db_name password=pw" -nln public.world_borders -nlt MULTIPOLYGON "TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.shp"

The Shapefile is imported as MULTIPOLYGON.

If you want to expode it to POLYGON in PostGIS, use ST_Dump:

SELECT 
  ogc_fid, 
  fips, 
  iso2, 
  iso3, 
  un, 
  name, 
  area, 
  pop2005, 
  region, 
  subregion, 
  lon, 
  lat, 
  ((ST_Dump(wkb_geometry)).geom)::geometry(Polygon,4326) geom
FROM public.world_borders;

Edit: this does not work because the initial Shapefile is corrupted. I've run QGIS's "Check geometry validity" tool and here is the output:

Try contacting the creator of the file to get a repaired version.