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 high_cost_connect_america_fund_broadband_map_caf table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"datahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip:latest"."high_cost_connect_america_fund_broadband_map_caf"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "overlapping_locations", -- This field indicates whether there are multiple locations sharing the same latitude and longitude (up to 5 digits after the decimal).
    "filing_year", -- Year when data was reported in High Cost Universal Broadband (HUBB) portal.
    "speed_tier", -- Broadband speed that meets the required minimum standard (varies by fund).
    "census_block", -- Census block of the deployment location.
    "locations_deployed", -- Number of household being served within a location.
    "deployment_state", -- State of the deployment location.
    "technology", -- CAF II Auction and RDOF carriers must report the type of technology used to deliver broadband service for all locations served. (This field is optional for carriers in other funds).
    "other_technology", -- This field is mandatory if a carrier selects “other technology” (option 7) from the list in the Technology field.
    "latency", -- CAF II Auction, Alaska Plan and RDOF carriers must report whether they provide low-latency broadband service (as indicated by a 2) or high-latency broadband service (as indicated by a 1). (This field is optional for carriers in other funds).
    "study_area_code", -- Unique number assigned to each ETC based on its service area. A carrier with multiple service areas within a single state will have multiple SAC.
    "fund_type", -- Individual High Cost fund under which the carrier deployed. See High Cost Funds Glossary for details.
    "deployment_city", -- City of the deployment location.
    "deployment_address", -- Address of the deployment location.
    "longitude", -- Longitude of the deployment location.
    "carrier", -- Standard name used to identify a study area. Typically, the carrier name is the same as the company name.
    "company_name", -- Company name of the affiliated carrier, or in its absence, carrier name.
    "latitude", -- Latitude of the deployment location.
    "deployment_zip_code", -- Zip Code of the deployment location.
    "sac_prim_state", -- The primary state assigned to the Study Area Code (SAC) is determined by the predominant area of broadband and voice service deployments, particularly in cases where the SAC boundary extends across state borders.
    "deployment_date" -- Date the deployment occurred.
FROM
    "datahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip:latest"."high_cost_connect_america_fund_broadband_map_caf"
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 datahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at datahub.usac.org. When you querydatahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip: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 datahub.usac.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 \
  "datahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "datahub.usac.org",
    "tables": {
        "high_cost_connect_america_fund_broadband_map_caf": "r59r-rpip"
    }
}'

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, datahub-usac/high-cost-connect-america-fund-broadband-map-caf-r59r-rpip is just another Postgres schema.