Query the Data Delivery Network

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 computer_aided_dispatch_entries table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"cambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6:latest"."computer_aided_dispatch_entries"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "location_1", -- Nearest address to event. Address with 100's block house numbers.
    "ladderdistrict", -- The Fire Department divides the city into 4 Ladder Districts, one for each of the on duty Ladder companies.
    "firebox", -- The Fire Department divides the city into "Firebox" districts, each assigned a unique response pre-plan.
    "policesector", -- The Police Department divides the city into 5 "sectors", for events requiring a two person response.
    "policeroute", -- The Police Department divides the city into 9 "routes", for events requiring a single person response
    "datetimereceived", -- Time when entered into CAD system. Does not always reflect actual time of event.
    "neighborhood", -- Name of Neighborhood district
    "reportingarea", -- The smallest geographic polygon used to determine which units are assigned to an area. Usually about the size of a city block.
    "address", -- The approximate address where the incident took place. 
    "priority", -- 1=Most critical, 2=medium, 3=least critical event
    "primaryagency", -- P=Police, F=Fire
    "datetimeclosed", -- Time event no longer active in CAD system. Might include subsequent administrative or investigative period.
    "enginedistrict", -- The Fire Department divides the city into 8 Engine Districts, one for each of the on duty Engine companies.
    "group", -- General crime/fire grouping
    "alarmlevel", -- Fire events only. Number of "Fire Alarms". The higher the number, the greater the number of responding apparatus.
    "type", -- Initial event as categorized by 911 call taker
    "fygroup", -- Grouping for Emergency Communications Dept. annual report summary totals
    "neighborhood_id", -- Code for Neighborhood district
    "intersection" -- The cross streets where an event happened, usually traffic-related.
FROM
    "cambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6:latest"."computer_aided_dispatch_entries"
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 cambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6 with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.cambridgema.gov. When you querycambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6: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

bash -c "$(curl -sL https://github.com/splitgraph/splitgraph/releases/latest/download/install.sh)"

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.cambridgema.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 \
  "cambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.cambridgema.gov",
    "tables": {
        "computer_aided_dispatch_entries": "ppai-cur6"
    }
}'

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, cambridgema-gov/computer-aided-dispatch-entries-ppai-cur6 is just another Postgres schema.