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 iowa_population_25_years_and_over_by_sex_race_and table in this repository, by referencing it like:
"mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3:latest"."iowa_population_25_years_and_over_by_sex_race_and"or in a full query, like:
SELECT
":id", -- Socrata column ID
"value", -- Population estimate 25 years and over associated with geography, variable, and data collection period.
"race", -- Race categories: White Alone, Black or African American Alone, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian Alone, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Alone, Some Other Race, and Two or More Races
"data_collection_period", -- The data collection period reflects the years associated with the 60 month data collection period.
"variable", -- Variable name identified by the US Census Bureau.
"name", -- Name of geography associated with the record.
"geography_id", -- Specific geography id used by the U.S. Census for the state, county, place or census tract associated with the record.
"location", -- Primary point for the specific geography.
"educational_attainment", -- Educational attainment categories: Less than High School, High School Graduate, Some College or Associates Degree, and Bachelors Degree or Higher. Those with NA are records reflecting total population estimate, or a total population estimate for a race and/or race and sex subgroups.
"date", -- The date when the 60 month data collection period concluded.
"type", -- Specifies the type of geography associated with the record. Categories include: state, county, place and tract.
"row_id", -- Unique Row Identifier
"variable_description", -- Describes the characteristics associated with the variable.
"sex", -- Sex categories: Male, Female, and Both
":@computed_region_y683_txed"
FROM
"mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3:latest"."iowa_population_25_years_and_over_by_sex_race_and"
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 mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3 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; sgrcan 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 cloneand sgr checkout.
Cloning Data
Because mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3: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 mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3Checkout 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 mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3:latestThis will download all the objects for the latest tag of mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3 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 mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3: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 mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3:latestThis 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, mydata-iowa-gov/iowa-population-25-years-and-over-by-sex-race-and-6jui-3yj3 is just another Postgres schema.