OCDS Kingfisher Views

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OCDS Kingfisher Views is used to create SQL tables that summarize the OCDS data in collections from OCDS Kingfisher Process.

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What’s a “view”?

“Views” in Kingfisher Views’ name and in its commands’ names refers to SQL schemas. To avoid confusion with a SQL view, we use “schemas” instead of “views” in this documentation. A SQL schema is like a set of SQL tables in a common namespace. It is not like a set of constraints, like XML schema or JSON Schema.

How it works

Kingfisher Views runs SQL statements to create schemas, containing tables and views, which summarize the OCDS data in specified collections from Kingfisher Process.

The schemas are created in the database used by Kingfisher Process, and the schemas’ names start with view. (The default public schema contains the tables created by Kingfisher Process.)

Typical usage

Create a schema

Once Kingfisher Views is installed, use the add-view command to create schemas that summarize one or more collections of your choice. (This command might take a long time to run. You might want to run it in a terminal multiplexer like tmux.)

Once it’s done, you can query the tables it created.

Query its tables

As documented in the add-view command, the schema you created has a name starting with view_data_, like view_data_collection_123 or view_data_collection_4_5_6 or view_data_the_name. To learn more about each table in the schema, refer to the Database tables reference.

To query a table in the schema you created, prefix the table name by the schema name and a period. For example:

SELECT * FROM view_data_collection_123.release_summary;

Instead of typing the schema name every time, you can set PostgreSQL’s search_path to a comma-separated list of schemas in which to search for tables. For example, if you want to query both a Kingfisher Views schema and Kingfisher Process’ tables, run this statement first:

SET search_path = view_data_collection_123, public;

You can then run statements like:

SELECT * FROM release_summary;
SELECT * FROM collection;

Delete the schema

Once you no longer need the schema, delete it using the delete-view command to free up disk space. (You can re-create it at any time using the add-view command.)