calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45
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 official_results_general_election_2013 table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45:latest"."official_results_general_election_2013"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "percentage_of_votes", -- Of the votes cast this shows the percentage cast for the candidate.
    "candidate_name",
    "incumbent", -- The candidate is the incumbent in the position.
    "ward", -- A ward of zero denotes the city wide ward. Regular wards are 1-14. Public and Separate School wards are 1-7 and are in format like 1(1,2).
    "time", -- Timestamp for these results
    "leading_by", -- The amount the leading candidate is leading by. Only the highest candidate has leading by value. All other candidates will have blank value.
    "acclaimed", -- The candidate was acclaimed to the position.
    "office",
    "ward_stations_reporting", -- Number of ward stations that have reported the results.
    "total_votes", -- Total votes cast for the candidate
    "total_city_wide_stations", -- Number of total city wide stations includes Hospital, Mail-in (Special) Ballot, Travelling and Advance Voting stations.
    "city_wide_stations_reporting", -- Number of city wide stations that have reported the results.
    "office_type", -- Mayor = 1. Councillor = 2. Public School Trustees = 3. Separate School Trustees = 4.
    "total_ward_stations" -- 1.	The number of voting stations listed in the Mayor results is the number of regular and special voting stations in that council ward.  2.	The number of voting stations listed in the Councillor results is the number of regular and special voting stations in that council ward.  3.	The number of voting stations listed in the results for Public School Trustees includes the number of regular and special voting stations for the applicable council wards.  4.	The number of voting stations listed in the results for Separate School Trustees includes the number of regular and special voting stations for the applicable council wards plus any voting stations in districts outside of Calgary governed by the Separate School Board.
FROM
    "calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45:latest"."official_results_general_election_2013"
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 calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45 with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.calgary.ca. When you querycalgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45: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.calgary.ca, 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 \
  "calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.calgary.ca",
    "tables": {
        "official_results_general_election_2013": "ibk8-8j45"
    }
}'

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, calgary-ca/official-results-general-election-2013-ibk8-8j45 is just another Postgres schema.