pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz
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 2020_primary_election_mail_ballot_requests table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz:latest"."2020_primary_election_mail_ballot_requests"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "mailapplicationtype", -- This identifies the type of mail ballot requested by the voter.   Alt - This is an alternative ballot application where voters who are 65 years of age and the polling place may not be fully accessible.  BV - Bedridden Veteran. BVRI - Bedridden Veteran - Remote/Isolated C- This is an absentee ballot application issued during the emergency absentee period.  CIV- This is a civilian absentee ballot application that was submitted via paper. CRI- This is an absentee ballot application for an overseas civilian voter in a remote/isolated location.  CVO- This is an absentee ballot application for an overseas civilian voter. F- This is an absentee application for an individual who qualifies to vote for federal offices in federal election years. OLMAILV-This is a mail ballot application that was submitted online.  M-This is an absentee ballot application for a military voter.  MAILIN-This is a mail-in ballot application.  MRI-This is an absentee ballot application for a military voter in a remote/isolated location.  OLREGV-This is a civilian absentee ballot application that was submitted online. PER-This is an absentee ballot application where a voter has requested permanent status.  PMI- This is a mail ballot application where the voter has requested permanent status.  REG-This is an absentee ballot application that was submitted via paper.  OLMAILNV: Online Mail-In Ballot Application. Not Verified OLREGNV: Online Regular Absentee Ballot Application. V - Veteran. Not Verified BV: Bedridden Veteran (which is a form of Absentee Ballot Application)
    "congressional", -- This is the voter's congressional district. 
    "legislative", -- This is the voter's state house district. 
    "dateofbirth", -- This is the voter's date of birth. 
    "senate", -- This is the voter's state senate district.
    "ballotreturneddate", -- This is the date the county marked the ballot as received after the voter mailed the voted ballot back to the county.
    "ballotsentdate", -- This is the date the county confirmed the application to queue a ballot label to mail the ballot materials to the voter.
    "appreturndate", -- This is the date the application was processed by the county election office. 
    "appissuedate", -- This is the date the application was submitted by the voter.
    "party", -- This identifies the voter's party when submitting their application.
    "countyname" -- This identifys the county of the voter when submitting an application to vote by mail ballot in the upcoming election. 
FROM
    "pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz:latest"."2020_primary_election_mail_ballot_requests"
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 pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.pa.gov. When you querypa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz: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.pa.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 \
  "pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.pa.gov",
    "tables": {
        "2020_primary_election_mail_ballot_requests": "853w-ecfz"
    }
}'

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, pa-gov/2020-primary-election-mail-ballot-requests-853w-ecfz is just another Postgres schema.