mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c
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 county_actual_expenditures_by_service_area_by table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c:latest"."county_actual_expenditures_by_service_area_by"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "county_environment_and", -- Expenditures for environmental quality, conservation and recreational services, animal control, educational services and county development.
    "administration", -- Expenditures for policy & administration, central services and risk management services.
    "county", -- Name of the county for which the data is being displayed.
    "geocoded_column", -- Primary latitude and longitude in decimal degrees for the county as provided by U.S. Geological Survey, 19810501, U.S. Geographic Names Information Systems (GNIS): U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA.
    "operating_transfers_out", -- Expenditures associated with loans from budgeted funds to other than budgeted not repaid before the end of the fiscal year.
    "capital_projects", -- Expenditures related to roadway construction, county conservation land acquisition, and other capital improvement projects.
    "debt_service", -- Expenditures related to general obligation bonds or other long-term debt
    "nonprogram_current", -- Expenditures related to refund of amounts recorded as revenues in prior years, pass-through grants, and budgeted expenditures related to county farm.
    "government_services_to", -- Expenditures for representation services (e.g. election administration, local elections) and state administration services (e.g. motor vehicle registrations, driver license services, recording of public documents)
    "mental_health_id_dd", -- Expenditures for services to persons with mental illness, persons with chronic mental illness, persons with intellectual disability, and persons with other developmental disabilities.
    "physical_health_social", -- Expenditures for physical health services, services to the poor, services to military veterans, children's and family services, services to other adults, and the chemical dependency program.
    "public_safety_and_legal", -- Expenditures for law enforcement, legal services, emergency services, assistance to District Court System, court proceedings, and juvenile justice administration.
    "county_number", -- Iowa county code (1-99) associated with the county the expenditures shown are related to.
    "fiscal_year", -- Fiscal year during which expenditures shown occurred.  Fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.
    "subtotal_expenditures", -- Sum of operating expenditures
    "total_expenditures_other", -- Sum of Subtotal Expenditures, Operating Transfers Out and Refunded Debt/Escrow.
    "refunded_debt_payments_to", -- Accounts for principal payments to refund debt and payments to escrow agents for defeased debt.
    "roads_transportation", -- Expenditures for secondary roads administration and engineering, roadway maintenance, general roadway expenditures, and mass transit.
    ":@computed_region_3r5t_5243",
    ":@computed_region_wnea_7qqw",
    ":@computed_region_i9mz_6gmt",
    ":@computed_region_e7ym_nrbf",
    ":@computed_region_uhgg_e8y2"
FROM
    "mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c:latest"."county_actual_expenditures_by_service_area_by"
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 mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at mydata.iowa.gov. When you querymydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c: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 mydata.iowa.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 \
  "mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "mydata.iowa.gov",
    "tables": {
        "county_actual_expenditures_by_service_area_by": "fxbr-vb9c"
    }
}'

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, mydata-iowa-gov/county-actual-expenditures-by-service-area-by-fxbr-vb9c is just another Postgres schema.