ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2
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 dcf_children_in_placement_annual_pointintime_trend table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2:latest"."dcf_children_in_placement_annual_pointintime_trend"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "independent_living", -- Number of children where placement setting is some form of supervised but independent living setting, including Supportive Work, Education and Transition Programs (SWET), or Community Housing Apartment Programs (CHAP) 
    "hospital", -- Number of children where placement setting is in a Hospital setting for either medical or psychiatric reasons
    "group_home", -- Number of children where placement setting is some form of Group Home, which includes Maternity, Preparing Adolescents for Self-Sufficiency (PASS), Specialized or Therapeutic Group Home settings
    "pdc_safe_home", -- Number of children where placement setting is either a Permanency Diagnostic Center (not utilized since 2011), or a Safe Home (a temporary congregate care service that is a homelike setting providing immediate, 24-hour care for children ages 6-13, with some exceptions to age made to keep sibling groups together)
    "therapeutic_foster_care", -- Number of children where placement setting is some form of Therapeutic foster home (recruited, trained, and supported by a Child-Placing Agency on contract with DCF)
    "special_study", -- Number of children where placement setting is a Special Study foster home (provider is connected to the child in some fashion, but is not a member of the child's extended family;  in most cases providers are recruited, trained, licensed and supported by DCF directly, though some provide Therapeutic Foster Care but for reporting purposes are included in the Special Study category)
    "relative_care", -- Number of children where placement setting is a Relative Foster home (provider is a member of the child's extended family; in most cases providers are recruited, trained, licensed and supported by DCF directly, though some provide Therapeutic Foster Care but for reporting purposes are included in the Relative Care category)
    "foster_care", -- Number of children where placement setting is some form of DCF "Core" foster home (recruited, trained, licensed and supported by DCF directly)
    "total_cip", -- Total number of children in placement on the Month In Care date
    "office_name", -- DCF Office responsible for child's case
    "data_as_of", -- Date the data was pulled from the database
    "shelter", -- Number of children where placement setting is some form of Shelter (a temporary congregate care program that provides short-term care, assessment and a range of clinical and nursing services) 
    "dcf_highmeadows", -- Number of children where placement setting is the High Meadows facility (previously run by DCF and closed in 2009)
    "month_in_care", -- Observation Date; date the child was residing in an open DCF placement
    "dcf_cjts", -- Number of children where placement setting is the CT Juvenile Training School 
    "dcf_solnit", -- Number of children where placement setting is either the Solnit Center North Campus (formerly CT Children's Place) or Solnit Center South Campus (formerly Riverview Psychiatric Hospital)
    "out_of_state", -- Are placement settings outside CT? (Y/N)
    "region", -- DCF Region responsible for child's case
    "demographic", -- Age group of child (age on observation date):  0 - 3, 4 - 6, 7 - 12, 13 - 17, or >=18
    "residential" -- Number of children where placement setting is a Residential Treatment Center
FROM
    "ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2:latest"."dcf_children_in_placement_annual_pointintime_trend"
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 ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2 with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.ct.gov. When you queryct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2: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.ct.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 \
  "ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.ct.gov",
    "tables": {
        "dcf_children_in_placement_annual_pointintime_trend": "v6zb-h5e2"
    }
}'

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, ct-gov/dcf-children-in-placement-annual-pointintime-trend-v6zb-h5e2 is just another Postgres schema.