brla-gov/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg
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 cityparish_employees table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"brla-gov/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg:latest"."cityparish_employees"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "uniqueid", -- Unique Identifier
    "annual_pay", -- Annual salary based on paygrade and step, does not include any additional earnings
    "scheduled_hours", -- Scheduled hours per pay period
    "employment_end_date", -- End of service date, the employee may have retired, resigned or was terminated
    "current_hire_date", -- Most current date employee hired (Does not include broken service with the City-Parish) 
    "pay_range", -- The pay range or grade that is tied to an employee's current pay (one range may be applicable to multiple positions)
    "job_title",
    "job_code", -- Numerical value associated with an employee's position (job title)
    "department_name", -- Corresponds to the City-Parish department for which an employee works
    "payloc_name", -- Corresponds to the division or location where the employee works
    "state2pcnt", -- Statute requiring Fire employees to receive a raise of at least 2% each year after completion of 3 years of continuous service in the Fire Department. Effective for 20 years or until the employee's 23rd year of service.
    "hrly_rate",
    "personnel_status_desc",
    "years_service", -- Years of service with City-Parish based on current hire date
    "payloc_num", -- Numerical code associated with the division or location where an employee works (see pay location description column)
    "first_name",
    "carallowpay",
    "race",
    "last_name",
    "pay_step", -- The step at which an employee is paid within their pay range (there are 21 steps for each pay range)
    "edupay", -- Educational pay for employees receiving State Supplemental Pay, or for Municipal Fire and Police employees
    "middle_initial",
    "mealallowpay", -- Allowance for EMS employees
    "sex",
    "employment_status", -- Employee's status with the City-Parish.  A=Active; I=Inactive
    "department_num", -- Numerical code associated with the department for which an employee works (see department name column)
    "personnel_status", -- See personnel status description column
    "prisonpay", -- Employees assigned to work at the Parish Prison
    "englicnspay" -- Post license experience allowance for licensed professional engineers
FROM
    "brla-gov/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg:latest"."cityparish_employees"
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/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg 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/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg: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/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.brla.gov",
    "tables": {
        "cityparish_employees": "bj3z-jksg"
    }
}'

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/cityparish-employees-bj3z-jksg is just another Postgres schema.