I'm experimenting with postgres with postgis for use with
mapserver. I have loaded approximately 650 shapefiles into postgres,
each as a separate table. The name of each table is a unique identifier
for as species. Each represents a species distribution and may consist
of one or more polygons. What I would like to do is combine the 650
tables into a single table (Preferably without reloading them into
postgres with shp2pgsql). The complication is that I need to add a
column to each of the tables that incorporates the name of the table as
a unique identifier before merging the tables. Is their an easy way to
do this in postgres( 7.4) ??? Maybe I don't need to do this, but it
seems like the easiest way to set the database up (for the schema I have
in mind).