Q:

Gdal not working with Oracle Spatial's synonyms

I managed to get the OCI driver to work on both oracle table and views but I can't get it to work with synonyms. 
Is this a limitation or am I doing something wrong? 
Here's a sample of the command I'm using: 
"C:\Program Files\GDAL\ogr2ogr.exe" -f "ESRI Shapefile" "test_shape.shp" "OCI:<schema>/<password>@(DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = localhost)(PORT = 1521)))(CONNECT_DATA = (SID =orcl))):MY_LOCAL_SYNONYM

I get the following error:

ERROR 1: ORA-04043: object "MY_LOCAL_SYNONYM" does not exist

If I log into SQL Developer with the same schema/password and try to perform a select it works perfectly.
SELECT * FROM MY_LOCAL_SYNONYM;

SELECT * FROM <schema>.MY_LOCAL_SYNONYM;

A:

Synonyms are just simply not supported by the OCI driver. Then again, hardly any GIS tool understands anything but straight tables. A few understand views. Very few (I don't know of any) understands synonyms. 
In the case of GDAL, the OCI driver looks for a table or a view by the name you give, i.e. it searches for a table with that name in the USER_TABLES dictionary view, does not find any, then searches for a view in USER_VIEWS, and again does no find any.
Adding support for synonyms to the OCI driver is probably doable. You need to open a ticket for that at https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal

