controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z
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 all_city_funds table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z:latest"."all_city_funds"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "fund_category", -- General Fund, Special Fund, or Proprietary
    "fund_effective_date", -- Fund effective since
    "grant_project", -- Is the fund associated with a grant?
    "council_district", -- City Council District
    "capital_project", -- Does this Fund have any Capital Projects?
    "fund_group", -- Fiduciary, Governmental, or Proprietary
    "contact_email", -- Contact's email address
    "budget_schedule_number", -- Funds with a schedule number have revenue and expenditure budgets reviewed and approved by the Mayor and City Council. Funds without a schedule number are considered "off-budget" since their budgets are not reviewed and approved by the Mayor and City Council.
    "code_section", -- Administrative Code section
    "fund_balance", -- (C) where (C=A-B) - Total Assets minus Total Liabilities
    "current_cash_balance", -- Cash Balance
    "fund_name", -- Financial Management System fund name
    "contact_name", -- Departmental contact name
    "overhead_costs_reimbursement_eligibility", -- Fund is subject to overhead reimbursement costs
    "ordinance_number", -- Ordinance number used to establish the fund
    "fund_type", -- Agency, Capital Projects, Debt Service, Enterprise, General Fund, Pension Trust, General Long Term Debt Group, or Special Revenue
    "fund_purpose", -- Purpose and intent of the fund
    "sources_of_funds", -- Revenue source for this fund
    "budget_schedule_name", -- Name of the budget schedule found in the City's budget
    "last_expense_recorded", -- Last expense transaction recorded
    "other_cash_changes", -- Net of other transactions that increase or decrease the cash balance
    "liabilities", -- (B) Total Liabilities against the fund
    "inactive_fund_close", -- Is this an inactive fund? Default is no
    "collected_revenue", -- Revenue collected in the current fiscal year
    "fund_number", -- Financial Management System fund number
    "eligible_uses", -- Eligible uses for the fund
    "replacement_of_general_funds_allowed", -- Replacement of General Fund is allowed
    "total_budget", -- Total budget
    "general_fund_reversion", -- Is the fund subject to General Fund reversion?
    "assets", -- (A) Total Assets include Cash, Grant Receivables, and Other Assets
    "beginning_cash", -- Beginning cash balance for the fiscal year
    "budget_amendments", -- Amendments to the budget adopted by the Mayor and City Council
    "council_file_number", -- City Council file number authorizing the fund
    "adopted_budget", -- Budget adopted by the Mayor and City Council
    "function", -- Arts/Culture/Tourism, Debt Service, Economic Development, Sanitation & Environment, Other, Housing & Homelessness, Parks, Public Safety, Public Works, Social Services, Streets, or Transportation
    "interest_to_general_fund", -- Interest eligible for the General Fund?
    "council_file_link", -- Council file link information
    "cash_expenses", -- Cash disbursed in the current fiscal year
    "contact_telephone", -- Contact's telephone number
    "administering_department" -- Department administering the fund
FROM
    "controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z:latest"."all_city_funds"
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 controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at controllerdata.lacity.org. When you querycontrollerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z: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 controllerdata.lacity.org, 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 \
  "controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "controllerdata.lacity.org",
    "tables": {
        "all_city_funds": "ej7u-di9z"
    }
}'

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, controllerdata-lacity/all-city-funds-ej7u-di9z is just another Postgres schema.