brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s
Icon for Socrata external plugin

Query the Data Delivery Network

Query the DDN

The 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 animal_control_incidents table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s:latest"."animal_control_incidents"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "cpdispatcher", -- ID of employee who dispatched the officer to incident
    "disposition", -- How animal was processed once at ACC (e.g. transferred to the Companion Animal Alliance, an organization with which the City-Parish is contracted to perform all animal sheltering, adoptions, and animal reclaimations) 
    "cpstandby", -- Not dispatched by cad but there is dispatch info in record
    "cequip", -- ID of vehicle used to respond to incident
    "sex", -- Sex of animal
    "condition", -- Condition of animal
    "temperment", -- Temperment of animal
    "municipality", -- Municipality of incident
    "cpremarks", -- Remarks provided during initial call, if any
    "collar_color", -- Collar color
    "cpdisptime", -- Time an officer was dispatched to incident
    "cpoperator", -- ID of employee who took the call
    "cdispo", -- Indicates if officer was dispatched (D) or the call had to be postponed (K) and addressed the following day. 
    "carrival", -- Time officer arrived on scene
    "cavailable", -- Time officer was finished with incident and was once again available for another call
    "impoundno", -- Number used to track animals being impounded into shelter
    "impound_time", -- Time animal was brought into shelter
    "species", -- Species of animal
    "age", -- Age of animal
    "collar", -- Type of collar, if any
    "loczip", -- ZIP code of incident
    "cptimercvd", -- Time incident was called in
    "size", -- Size of animal
    "petname", -- Pet has a name.  Used when turning in animal to be adopted.
    "service_code", -- Code is used at the responding officer's discretion; may be the same as CPREMARKS but may be different if issue is not what complaint reported
    "vacc_num", -- Vaccination id number of animal, provided by owner
    "cpfileno", -- Internal file number of incident
    "color", -- Color of animal
    "vacdate", -- Date of vaccination of animal, provided by owner
    "cpstreet", -- Street  of complaintant
    "cpdate", -- Date incident was called in 
    "cprequest", -- Type of incident being reported
    "cpofficer", -- ID of officer who was dispatched to incident
    "impound_date", -- Date animal was brought into shelter
    "location", -- Location of incident
    "breed", -- Breed of animal
    "dispdate", -- Date of disposition 
    "dispoff" -- Name of officer responsible for disposition of animal 
FROM
    "brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s:latest"."animal_control_incidents"
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 brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.brla.gov. When you querybrla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s:latest on the DDN, we "mount" the repository using the socrata mount handler. The mount handler proxies your SQL query to the upstream data source, translating it from SQL to the relevant language (in this case SoQL).

We also cache query responses on the DDN, but we run the DDN on multiple nodes so a CACHE_HIT is only guaranteed for subsequent queries that land on the same node.

Query Your Local Engine

Install Splitgraph Locally
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 (like this repository), 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, where the author has pushed Splitgraph Images to the repository, you can "clone" and/or "checkout" the data using sgr cloneand sgr checkout.

Mounting Data

This repository is an external repository. It's not hosted by Splitgraph. It is hosted by data.brla.gov, and Splitgraph indexes it. This means it is not an actual Splitgraph image, so you cannot use sgr clone to get the data. Instead, you can use the socrata adapter with the sgr mount command. Then, if you want, you can import the data and turn it into a Splitgraph image that others can clone.

First, install Splitgraph if you haven't already.

Mount the table with sgr mount

sgr mount socrata \
  "brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.brla.gov",
    "tables": {
        "animal_control_incidents": "qmns-hw3s"
    }
}'

That's it! Now you can query the data in the mounted table like any other Postgres table.

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, brla-gov/animal-control-incidents-qmns-hw3s is just another Postgres schema.