Query the Data Delivery Network

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 state_agency_amazon_spend_fiscal_year_18 table in this repository, by referencing it like:

"wa-gov/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj:latest"."state_agency_amazon_spend_fiscal_year_18"

or in a full query, like:

SELECT
    ":id", -- Socrata column ID
    "unspsc", -- United Nations Standard Products and Services Code
    "title", -- Product title on Amazon.
    "shipment_date", -- Date when the item was shipped.
    "purchase_ppu", -- Purchased Price Per Unit.
    "product_condition", -- Condition of the item purchased (new, used, used good, etc.).
    "product_category", -- Category of the product according to Amazon terminology.
    "pricing_discount_applied_1", -- Percentage discounted as part of a pricing program.
    "pricing_discount_applied", -- Amount (in dollars) discounted as part of a pricing program.
    "payment_date", -- Date when payment transaction was made.
    "payment_amount", -- Amount charged for a particular transaction. 
    "part_number", -- Manufacturer part number as provided by the vendor or seller.
    "order_date", -- Date the order was placed.
    "manufacturer", -- Name of the manufacturer as provided by the vendor or seller.
    "listed_ppu", -- Listed Price Per Unit on Amazon Business.
    "item_subtotal", -- Total principal amount you paid for individual items in the order. Excludes tax, promotions, discounts, and shipping and handling.
    "item_shipping_handling", -- Principal amounts for the shipping and handling for each item. Excludes the corresponding tax and discount amounts.
    "item_quantity", -- Quantity of a line item.
    "item_promotion", -- Total discounts or promotions applied to a line item. Includes all discount components (discount on price, shipping, gift wrapping, other fees, etc.). Excludes tax.
    "item_net_total", -- Total charged for the item. Including tax, discounts, shipping and handling, and item price.
    "item_model_number", -- Generic model number for the item. This information is provided by the vendor or seller.
    "brand_code", -- Brand code as provided by the vendor or seller.
    "brand", -- Item Brand as provided by the vendor or seller.
    "asin", -- Amazon Standard Identification Number for products.
    "agency_name", -- Name of agency that placed order.
    "seller_name", -- Name of the seller on Amazon.com.
    "discount_program", -- Negotiated Pricing or Quantity Discounts.
    "item_tax" -- Total tax charged on item.
FROM
    "wa-gov/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj:latest"."state_agency_amazon_spend_fiscal_year_18"
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/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj 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/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj: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

bash -c "$(curl -sL https://github.com/splitgraph/splitgraph/releases/latest/download/install.sh)"

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/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj" \
  --handler-options '{
    "domain": "data.wa.gov",
    "tables": {
        "state_agency_amazon_spend_fiscal_year_18": "ja54-ddzj"
    }
}'

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/state-agency-amazon-spend-fiscal-year-18-ja54-ddzj is just another Postgres schema.