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 police_data_traffic_citations table in this repository, by referencing it like:
"somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9:latest"."police_data_traffic_citations"or in a full query, like:
SELECT
":id", -- Socrata column ID
"address", -- Address or intersection where the crash occurred.
"police_shift", -- The police work shift during which the traffic violation occurred.
"blockcode", -- Block codes represent the census block where each incident occurred. Somerville is composed of approximately 700 census blocks. Census blocks are numbered uniquely with a four-digit census block number from 0000 to 9999 within census tract code, which nests within state and county codes. These block codes are used to map incidents in the associated Tableau visualizations. Block codes are automatically assigned using the incident address and a small portion of incidents with limited address information may be mapped to a nearby block.
"vehiclemph", -- MPH vehicle was recorded at
"mphzone", -- MPH zone the vehicle was recorded in
"ward", -- The Ward where the violation occurred.
"long", -- Longitude measures distance east or west of the prime meridian. When coupled with longitude, a specific geographic location is identified.
"chgcategory", -- Category the violation falls under. Used to group similar types together for the Tableau visualization.
"warning", -- Whether this citation resulted in a warning.
"dtissued", -- When the traffic violation occurred.
"citationnum", -- A unique number representing each citation issued and the sequence of violation(s).
"chgcode", -- Each code represents a specific traffic violation. The code refers to the chapter and section of Massachusetts General Law that was violated.
"chgdesc", -- The traffic violation that occurred. The violation code is appended to the end of each violation description.
"lat" -- Latitude measures the distance north or south of the equator. When coupled with longitude, a specific geographic location is identified.
FROM
"somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9:latest"."police_data_traffic_citations"
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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9 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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9: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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9Checkout 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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9:latestThis will download all the objects for the latest tag of somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9 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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9: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 somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9: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, somervillema-gov/police-data-traffic-citations-3mqx-eye9 is just another Postgres schema.