There are many different ways of importing data into a PostGIS database. It is more than likely that you will not have to use all of them all the time but rather have your preferred ways of loading the data in your standard routines.
It is worth knowing different tools, though considered as different scenarios, may have to be addressed with special care. When you add scripting to the stack (see the chapter on ETL), you are equipped with some simple yet very powerful tools that may constitute a decent ETL toolbox.
Having fed our database with data, next, we'll have a look at spatial data analysis and find our way through a rich function set of PostGIS.