ST_Geometry::ST_GeomFromShape(shape[, srid])

Parses a string containing a single ESRI shape and creates a geometry value of the appropriate type. The record is a single record from the .shp file of an ESRI shapefile or it could be a single string value from a geodatabase.

The Shape representation is widely used to represent spatial data. For a full description of the shape definition, see the ESRI website,  http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf.

In most cases it is easier to load an ESRI shapefile using the SHAPEFILE format with the FORMAT clause of the LOAD TABLE statement, or an OPENSTRING expression in a FROM clause instead of using the ST_GeomFromShape method. See LOAD TABLE statement, and FROM clause.