wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa
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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 debt_reported_by_candidates_and_political table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa:latest"."debt_reported_by_candidates_and_political"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "vendor_state", -- The state of the vendor or recipient.
    "vendor_address", -- The street address of the vendor or recipient..
    "vendor_name", -- The name of the vendor or recipient’s name. The names appearing here have not been normalized and the same entity may be represented by different names in the dataset. 
    "debt_date", -- The date that the debt was incurred. 
    "thru_date", -- The end date of the period for the report on which this debt record was reported.
    "from_date", -- The start date of the period for the report on which this debt record was reported.
    "amount", -- The amount of the debt incurred or order placed. This field could be an estimate while the campaign is awaiting the final invoice.  This column may contain a few negative amounts. These are caused by inaccurate reporting by the filer.
    "election_year", -- The election year in the case of candidates and single election committees. The reporting year in the case of continuing political committees.
    "jurisdiction_county", -- The county associated with the jurisdiction of a candidate or local ballot proposition. Multi-county jurisdictions are reported as the primary county. This field will be empty for political committees and when a candidate jurisdiction is statewide.
    "jurisdiction", -- The political jurisdiction associated with the office of a candidate or a local ballot initiative.
    "filer_name", -- The candidate or committee name as reported on the form C1 for candidates or Form C1PC for political committee registration. The name will be consistent across all records for the same filer id and election year but may differ across years due to candidates or committees changing their name.
    "filer_id", -- The unique id assigned to a candidate or political committee. The filer id is consistent across election years with the exception that an individual running for a second office in the same election year will receive a second filer id. There is no correlation between the two filer ids. For a candidate and single-election-year committee such as a ballot committee, the combination of filer_id and election_year uniquely identifies a campaign.
    "committee_id", -- The unique identifier of a committee. For a continuing committee, this id will be the same for all the years that the committee is registered. Single year committees and candidate committees will have a unique id for each year even though the candidate or committee organization might be the same across years. Surplus accounts will have a single committee id across all years.
    "vendor_city", -- The city of the vendor or recipient. 
    "jurisdiction_type", -- The type of jurisdiction this office is: Statewide, Local, etc.
    "description", -- The reported description of the transaction.
    "legislative_district", -- The Washington State legislative district. This field only applies to candidates where the office is "state senator" or "state representative."
    "code", -- The type of debt. The values displayed are human readable equivalents of the type codes reported on the form C4 schedule B. Please refer to the form for a listing of all codes. Itemized debts are generally required to have either a code or a description but may be required to have both. 
    "party", -- The political party as declared by the candidate or committee on their form C1 registration. Contains only parties as recognized by Washington State law. This field does not apply to political committees.
    "filer_type", -- Indicates if this record is for a candidate or a political committee. In the case of a political committee, it may be either a continuing political committee, party committee or single election year committee.
    "record_type", -- This field designates the item as a debt.
    "id", -- PDC internal identifier that corresponds to a single expenditure record. When combined with the origin value, this number uniquely identifies a single row.
    "office", -- The office sought by the candidate. Does not apply to political committees.
    "position", -- The position associated with an office. This field typically applies to any jurisdictions that have multiple positions or seats; for example State Representative, Judicial, and local offices. This field does not apply to political committees.
    "report_number", -- PDC identifier used for tracking the individual form C4 . Multiple debts will have the same report number when they were reported to the PDC at the same time. The report number is unique to the report it represents. When a report is amended, a new report number is assigned that supersedes the original version and the original report records are not included in this dataset.
    "vendor_zip", -- The zip code of the vendor or recipient.
    "origin", -- This field shows from which filed report-type the data originates. B.3 refers to Block 3 of Schedule B to the C4.  To view the different report types and forms browse to: https://www.pdc.wa.gov/learn/forms 
    "url" -- A link to a PDF version of the original report as it was filed to the PDC.
FROM
    "wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa:latest"."debt_reported_by_candidates_and_political"
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 wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa with SQL in under 60 seconds.

This repository is an "external" repository. That means it's hosted elsewhere, in this case at data.wa.gov. When you querywa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa: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.wa.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 \
  "wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.wa.gov",
    "tables": {
        "debt_reported_by_candidates_and_political": "3r6b-hsaa"
    }
}'

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, wa-gov/debt-reported-by-candidates-and-political-3r6b-hsaa is just another Postgres schema.