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 ifc_investment_services_projects table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"finances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm:latest"."ifc_investment_services_projects"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "ifc_investment_for_equity_million_usd", -- Equity - Ownership interest in a corporation or enterprise that represents a claim on the assets of the entity in proportion to the number and class of shares owned. 
    "ifc_invested_date",
    "department", -- World Bank Group organizational entity within a Vice Presidency, comprised of one or more units and/or divisions.
    "country", -- Country where investment and/or advisory services are executed and/or utilized.
    "company_name",
    "ifc_investment_for_loan_million_usd", -- Loans - money advances to a client, to be repaid at a later date, usually with interest and/or fees.
    "ifc_investment_for_guarantee_million_usd", -- Guarantee - promise from one entity to assume responsibility for the payment of a financial obligation of another entity if such other entity fails to perform. A guarantee is a contingent liability of the guarantor.
    "ifc_approval_date",
    "project_board_date", -- Summary of Project Information is prepared and distributed to the public in advance of the IFC Board of Directors’ consideration of the proposed transaction. Board dates are estimates only.
    "ifc_country_code", -- Country code according to IFC Code list.
    "ifc_signed_date",
    "project_name", -- Name of an investment project  - discrete unit of work associated with provision of financial product to a client.
    "date_disclosed", -- Date when the record was first disclosed.
    "country_code", -- Country code according to WBG Code list. Might be different from ISO codes.
    "ifc_investment_for_risk_management_million_usd", -- Risk Management - product designed to hedge the financial risk of IFC client(s) using derivative products.
    "project_number", -- Numeric code that uniquely identifies a project.
    "total_ifc_investment_as_approved_by_board_million_usd", -- Sum of project's financial product(s) prior to approval and approved.
    "environmental_category", -- Code indicating nature and extent of environmental and social assessment needed fro investment project as defined in IFC's Policy on Environmental and Social Sustainability.
    "status", -- Identifies standing of a project.
    "product_line", -- Identifies IFC Financial Product. This is the highest level of classification to be applied to Ifc product. Each IFC product must be assigned one and only one product type.
    "as_of_date", -- Date when this snapshot was taken.
    "industry", -- Name that follows the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) schema identifying a distinct economic segment, and is the lowest classification level.
    "document_type",
    "project_url" -- Link to a project page on IFC Projects website.
FROM
    "finances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm:latest"."ifc_investment_services_projects"
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 finances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at finances.worldbank.org. When you queryfinances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm: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 finances.worldbank.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 \
  "finances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "finances.worldbank.org",
    "tables": {
        "ifc_investment_services_projects": "efin-cagm"
    }
}'

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, finances-worldbank/ifc-investment-services-projects-efin-cagm is just another Postgres schema.