wa-gov/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp
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 expenditures_by_candidates_and_political table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"wa-gov/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp:latest"."expenditures_by_candidates_and_political"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "recipient_city", -- The city of the individual or vendor paid as reported.  Please refer to the recipient_name field for more information regarding address fields.
    "jurisdiction_type", -- The type of jurisdiction this office is: Statewide, Local, etc.
    "jurisdiction", -- The political jurisdiction associated with the office of a candidate.
    "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.
    "legislative_district", -- The Washington State legislative district. This field only applies to candidates where the office is "state senator" or "state representative."
    "office", -- The office sought by the candidate. Does not apply to political committees.
    "report_number", -- PDC identifier used for tracking the individual form C4 . Multiple expenditures 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.
    "url", -- A link to a PDF version of the original report as it was filed to the PDC.
    "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.
    "for_or_against", -- Ballot initiative committees are formed to either support or oppose an initiative. This field represents whether a committee “Supports” or “Opposes” a ballot initiative. 
    "id", -- PDC internal identifier that corresponds to a single expenditure record. When combined with the origin value, this number uniquely identifies a single row.
    "payee", -- A campaign may reimburse a person or entity for expenses they occurred on behalf of the campaign. In those cases, the subcontractor or business that provided the products or services will appear as the recipient and the person or entity who was paid or reimbursed for procuring the services or products is the payee.
    "election_year", -- The election year in the case of candidates and single election committees. The reporting year in the case of continuing political committees.
    "recipient_address", -- The street address of the individual or vendor paid as reported.  Please refer to the recipient_name field for more information regarding address fields.
    "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.
    "description", -- The reported description of the transaction. Non-itemized expenditures will not contain a description.
    "jurisdiction_county", -- The county associated with the jurisdiction of a candidate. Multi-county jurisdictions as reported as the primary county. This field will be empty for political committees and when a candidate jurisdiction is statewide.
    "recipient_zip", -- The zip code of the individual or vendor paid as reported.  Please refer to the recipient_name field for more information regarding address fields.
    "party", -- The political party as declared by the candidate or committee on their form C1 registration. Contains only "Major parties" as recognized by Washington State law.
    "recipient_state", -- The state of the individual or vendor paid as reported.  Please refer to the recipient_name field for more information regarding address fields.
    "expenditure_date", -- The date that the expenditure was made or the in-kind contribution was received. See the metadata for the origin and amount field regarding in-kind contributions.
    "code", -- The type of expenditure. The values displayed are human readable equivalents of the type codes reported on the form C4 schedule A. Please refer to the form for a listing of all codes. Itemized expenditures are generally required to have either a code or a description but may be required to have both. Non-itemized expenditures do not have a description.
    "amount", -- The amount of the expenditure or in-kind contribution. In-kind contributions are both a contribution and an expenditure and represented in both the contributions and expenditures data.
    "ballot_number", -- If the committee is a Statewide Ballot Initiative Committee a ballot number will appear once a ballot number is assigned by the Secretary of State. Local Ballot Initiatives will not have a ballot number. This field will contain a number only if the Secretary of State issues a number. 
    "origin", -- This field shows from which filed report-type the data originates. A/LE50 refers to non-itemized expenditures of $200 and less per expenditure. A/GT50 refers to itemized expenditures greater than $200 per expenditure. A/LE50 and A/GT50 are both reported on schedule A of form C4. As part of inflationary rule changes the dollar amount increased on April 1, 2023 from $50 and less per expenditure to $200 and less per expenditure. 
    "position", -- 	The position associated with an office. This field typically applies to judicial and local office that have multiple positions or seats. This field does not apply to political committees.
    "recipient_name", -- The name of the individual or vendor paid as reported. The names appearing here have not been normalized and the same entity may be represented by different names in the dataset. Non-itemized expenditures of $200 or less will have a recepient_name of EXPENSES OF $200 OR LESS and origin of A/LE50, and all address fields will be empty.  As part of inflationary rule changes the dollar amount increased on April 1, 2023 from $50 or less to $200 or less.
    "creditor", -- The creditor is the person, vendor or entity to whom the campaign debt is owed.
    "recipient_location", -- The geocoded location of the individual or vendor paid as reported. The quality of the geocoded location is dependent on how many of the address fields are available and is calculated using a third-party service. The PDC has not verified the results of the geocoding. Please refer to the recipient_name field for more information regarding address fields.
    "itemized_or_non_itemized", -- A record for an itemized expenditure represents a single expenditure. A record for a non-itemized expenditure represents one or more expenditures where the individual expenditures are less than the limit for itemized reporting. In this case the record is the aggregate total for the reporting period. 
    "filer_name" -- The candidate or committee name as reported on the form C1 candidate or committee registration form. 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.
FROM
    "wa-gov/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp:latest"."expenditures_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/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp 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/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp: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/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.wa.gov",
    "tables": {
        "expenditures_by_candidates_and_political": "tijg-9zyp"
    }
}'

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/expenditures-by-candidates-and-political-tijg-9zyp is just another Postgres schema.