Query the Data Delivery Network
Query the DDNThe easiest way to query any data on Splitgraph is via the "Data Delivery Network" (DDN). The DDN is a single endpoint that speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol. Any Splitgraph user can connect to it at data.splitgraph.com:5432
and query any version of over 40,000 datasets that are hosted or proxied by Splitgraph.
For example, you can query the vision_service_plan_vsp_vision_and_eye_health
table in this repository, by referencing it like:
"cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest"."vision_service_plan_vsp_vision_and_eye_health"
or in a full query, like:
SELECT
":id", -- Socrata column ID
"geographic_level",
"geolocation", -- Latitude & Longitude to be provided for formatting GeoLocation in the format (latitude, longitude)
"riskfactorresponseid", -- Lookup identifier for the Major Risk Factor Response
"raceethnicityid", -- Lookup identifier for the Race/Ethnicity stratification
"genderid", -- Lookup identifier for the Gender stratification
"ageid", -- Lookup identifier for the Age stratification
"datavaluetypeid", -- Lookup identifier for the data value type
"responseid", -- Lookup identifier for the Response
"questionid", -- Lookup identifier for the Question
"categoryid", -- Lookup identifier for the Category
"locationid", -- Lookup identifier value for the location
"sample_size", -- Sample size used to calculate the data value
"numerator", -- The actual number of patients in the dataset with the condition (n)
"high_confidence_limit", -- 95% confidence interval higher bound
"low_confidence_limit", -- 95% confidence interval lower bound
"data_value_footnote", -- Footnote text
"data_value_footnote_symbol", -- Footnote symbol
"data_value", -- A numeric data value greater than or equal to 0, or no value when footnote symbol and text are present
"riskfactor", -- Stratification value for major risk factor (e.g., All participants, Diabetes)
"raceethnicity", -- Stratification value for race (e.g., All races, Asian, Black, non-hispanic, Hispanic, any race, North American Native, White, non-hispanic, or Other)
"gender", -- Stratification value for gender (e.g., Total, Male, Female, or Unknown)
"age", -- Stratification value for age group (e.g., 0-17 years)
"response", -- Optional column to hold the response value that was evaluated.
"question", -- Question description (e.g., Percentage of adults with diabetic retinopathy)
"category", -- Category description
"topic", -- Topic description
"datasource", -- Abbreviation of Data Source
"locationdesc", -- Location (National or state) full name
"locationabbr", -- Location (National or state) abbreviation
"riskfactorid", -- Lookup identifier for the Major Risk Factor
"topicid", -- Lookup identifier for the Topic
"data_value_type", -- The data value type, such as age-adjusted prevalence or crude prevalence
"data_value_unit", -- The unit, such as "%" for percent
"riskfactorresponse", -- Column holding the response for the risk factor that was evaluated (e.g., All participants, Yes, No, or Unknown)
"yearend", -- Ending year for year range. Same as starting year if single year used in evaluation.
"yearstart" -- Starting year for year range
FROM
"cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest"."vision_service_plan_vsp_vision_and_eye_health"
LIMIT 100;
Connecting to the DDN is easy. All you need is an existing SQL client that can connect to Postgres. As long as you have a SQL client ready, you'll be able to query cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c
with SQL in under 60 seconds.
Query Your Local Engine
bash -c "$(curl -sL https://github.com/splitgraph/splitgraph/releases/latest/download/install.sh)"
Read the installation docs.
Splitgraph Cloud is built around Splitgraph Core (GitHub), which includes a local Splitgraph Engine packaged as a Docker image. Splitgraph Cloud is basically a scaled-up version of that local Engine. When you query the Data Delivery Network or the REST API, we mount the relevant datasets in an Engine on our servers and execute your query on it.
It's possible to run this engine locally. You'll need a Mac, Windows or Linux system to install sgr
, and a Docker installation to run the engine. You don't need to know how to actually use Docker; sgr
can manage the image, container and volume for you.
There are a few ways to ingest data into the local engine.
For external repositories, the Splitgraph Engine can "mount" upstream data sources by using sgr mount
. This feature is built around Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW). You can write custom "mount handlers" for any upstream data source. For an example, we blogged about making a custom mount handler for HackerNews stories.
For hosted datasets (like this repository), where the author has pushed Splitgraph Images to the repository, you can "clone" and/or "checkout" the data using sgr clone
and sgr checkout
.
Cloning Data
Because cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest
is a Splitgraph Image, you can clone the data from Spltgraph Cloud to your local engine, where you can query it like any other Postgres database, using any of your existing tools.
First, install Splitgraph if you haven't already.
Clone the metadata with sgr clone
This will be quick, and does not download the actual data.
sgr clone cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c
Checkout the data
Once you've cloned the data, you need to "checkout" the tag that you want. For example, to checkout the latest
tag:
sgr checkout cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest
This will download all the objects for the latest
tag of cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c
and load them into the Splitgraph Engine. Depending on your connection speed and the size of the data, you will need to wait for the checkout to complete. Once it's complete, you will be able to query the data like you would any other Postgres database.
Alternatively, use "layered checkout" to avoid downloading all the data
The data in cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest
is 0 bytes. If this is too big to download all at once, or perhaps you only need to query a subset of it, you can use a layered checkout.:
sgr checkout --layered cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c:latest
This will not download all the data, but it will create a schema comprised of foreign tables, that you can query as you would any other data. Splitgraph will lazily download the required objects as you query the data. In some cases, this might be faster or more efficient than a regular checkout.
Read the layered querying documentation to learn about when and why you might want to use layered queries.
Query the data with your existing tools
Once you've loaded the data into your local Splitgraph Engine, you can query it with any of your existing tools. As far as they're concerned, cdc-gov/vision-service-plan-vsp-vision-and-eye-health-4r3g-hv9c
is just another Postgres schema.