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 2020_census_tracts_to_2020_ntas_and_cdtas table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm:latest"."2020_census_tracts_to_2020_ntas_and_cdtas"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "cdtatype", -- Differentiates between CDTAS which represent a community district (CD) or a joint interest area - areas outside of community districts (JIA)
    "cdtaname", -- Full name of CDTA [e.g., BK05 East New York-Cypress Hills (CD 5 Approximation)]
    "ntaname", -- Full NTA name [e.g., East New York (North)]
    "ct2020", -- 2020 census tract number
    "boroct2020", -- Unqiue Identifier for 2020 census tracts - merged string value of the BoroCode and census tract number
    "geoid", -- Unqiue Identifier for 2020 census tracts - the first digit is the County FIPS code, and the last 6 digits are the zero-filled census tract number. This can be used with BYTES of the Big Apple datasets: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/open-data.page#district_political
    "cdtacode", -- Unique alphanumeric identifier representing Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA). Includes 4 characters: 2 alpha characters representing the borough and 2 numeric characters matching the CD number
    "ntaabbrev", -- Shortened version of NTA name (e.g., ENY_N)
    "ntatype", -- The NTA type differentiates between residential and various non-residential geographies. It is also the 5th character of the NTA code. [0 = Residential, 9 = Park, 8 = Airport, 7 = Cemetery, 6 = Other Special Areas (including forts, navy yard, etc), 5 = Rikers Island]
    "ntacode", -- Unique alphanumeric identifier for each Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA). Includes  6 characters: 2 alpha for borough, 2 numeric matching CDTA number, 1 numberic indicating NTA Type, and 1 numeric to create unique ID
    "ctlabel", -- The census tract identifier. Each census tract number is unique to its borough
    "countyfips", -- Federal unique ID for counties (005=Bronx, 047=Kings, 061=New York, 081=Queens, 085=Richmond)
    "borocode", -- Borough in which the census tract is located. (1=Manhattan, 2=The Bronx, 3=Brooklyn, 4=Queens, 5=Staten Island)
    "boroname" -- Borough name for the borough in which the census tract is located.
FROM
    "cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm:latest"."2020_census_tracts_to_2020_ntas_and_cdtas"
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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm with SQL in under 60 seconds.

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, 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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm: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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm

Checkout 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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm:latest

This will download all the objects for the latest tag of cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm 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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm: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 cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm:latest

This 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, cityofnewyork-us/2020-census-tracts-to-2020-ntas-and-cdtas-hm78-6dwm is just another Postgres schema.

Related Documentation:

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