Query the Data Delivery Network
Query the DDNThe 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 sales_use_hotel_occupancy_tax_licenses_and table in this repository, by referencing it like:
"pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latest"."sales_use_hotel_occupancy_tax_licenses_and"or in a full query, like:
SELECT
":id", -- Socrata column ID
"country", -- Country of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application
":@computed_region_r6rf_p9et",
":@computed_region_rayf_jjgk",
":@computed_region_d3gw_znnf",
":@computed_region_nmsq_hqvv",
":@computed_region_amqz_jbr4",
"location_1_state",
"trade_name", -- Trade Name of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application
"location_1", -- Street address of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application • City of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application • State of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application Created the LAT/LONG during import
"county", -- County of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application.
"location_1_city",
"location_1_address",
"license_type", -- License or Certificate type that was requested on the application. Sales tax licenses can be broken into Retail, Wholesale, Transient Vendor or Promoters. Exemption certificates can be broken down into Volunteer Fire companies, Religious organizations, Charitable organizations, Non-Profit educational organizations, Relief associations, Veterans organizations, School Districts or Miscellaneous.
"account", -- Account number used to track the sales tax purchases or number of the certificate provided by the Department of Revenue (DOR). Account numbers are eight (8) digits in length. Accounts starting with 00 through 74 or 80 through 99 are sales tax licenses broken down into types in the column License or Certificate type. Accounts starting with 75 are exemption certificates, also broken down in the License or Certificate type column. Accounts starting with 76 are school district exemption certificates. 2 Number suppression to protect the Account number.
"legal_name", -- Legal Name of the entity or individual registering as provided on the application
"location_1_zip",
"postal_code", -- Postal Code of the location where the license/certificate will be used as provided on the application
"expiration_date" -- Expiration date of the license or certificate. Most licenses or certificates must be renewed every 5 years, but some are permanent, indicated by the date 12/31/9999. Transient vendor licenses expire January 31 of the year following the year initially applied, then renewed every year afterwards.
FROM
"pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latest"."sales_use_hotel_occupancy_tax_licenses_and"
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/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd with SQL in under 60 seconds.
Query Your Local Engine
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, 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 (like this repository), where the author has pushed Splitgraph Images to the repository, you can "clone" and/or "checkout" the data using sgr cloneand sgr checkout.
Cloning Data
Because pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latest is a Splitgraph Image, you can clone the data from Spltgraph Cloud to your local engine, where you can query it like any other Postgres database, using any of your existing tools.
First, install Splitgraph if you haven't already.
Clone the metadata with sgr clone
This will be quick, and does not download the actual data.
sgr clone pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxdCheckout the data
Once you've cloned the data, you need to "checkout" the tag that you want. For example, to checkout the latest tag:
sgr checkout pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latestThis will download all the objects for the latest tag of pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd and load them into the Splitgraph Engine. Depending on your connection speed and the size of the data, you will need to wait for the checkout to complete. Once it's complete, you will be able to query the data like you would any other Postgres database.
Alternatively, use "layered checkout" to avoid downloading all the data
The data in pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latest is 0 bytes. If this is too big to download all at once, or perhaps you only need to query a subset of it, you can use a layered checkout.:
sgr checkout --layered pa-gov/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd:latestThis will not download all the data, but it will create a schema comprised of foreign tables, that you can query as you would any other data. Splitgraph will lazily download the required objects as you query the data. In some cases, this might be faster or more efficient than a regular checkout.
Read the layered querying documentation to learn about when and why you might want to use layered queries.
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/sales-use-hotel-occupancy-tax-licenses-and-ugeq-ckxd is just another Postgres schema.