Introducing Direct SQL Connection for QGIS, Databricks & more

Summary

Connect to CARTO from other GIS or BI tools & database clients: bring your CARTO data to other tools you already use.

This post may describe functionality for an old version of CARTO. Find out about the latest and cloud-native version here.
Introducing Direct SQL Connection for QGIS, Databricks & more

Working with multiple software tools can take up a lot of your time connecting workflows and platforms across your IT infrastructure. Here at CARTO we’re on a mission to help you be more efficient by integrating CARTO to other applications you use. That’s why we’re constantly improving our functionality to allow for easy-to-use integrations between CARTO and other applications.

We’re excited to announce the new Direct SQL Connection feature available now to all enterprise customers. With this new feature you can bring your CARTO data to other tools you already use such as QGIS Databricks PowerBI and more—securely connecting to your CARTO database from any application that supports PostgreSQL as a data source.

Graphic showing CARTO connector options


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Some use cases

This feature opens a world of possibilities like:

  1. Advanced GIS editing or geoprocessing from desktop tools like QGIS

    You can connect from QGIS to your CARTO database using a regular PostGIS connection. Then you can use QGIS to create new datasets edit existing datasets with QGIS powerful editing capabilities or create complex spatial analysis models over CARTO datasets using the QGIS processing framework.
  2. Using CARTO data in BI applications reports and dashboards like Power BI or Tableau

    You can access your CARTO database from BI applications using ODBC or JDBC connectors. Then you can create dashboards or reports where you use the information in your CARTO datasets.
  3. Improving your data science workflows developed with data analytics platforms like Databricks

    You can connect directly your Databricks cluster to your CARTO database using a JDBC connection from your notebook. Then you can read data from your CARTO dataset using dataframes and take advantage of Databricks functionality for cleaning transforming or enriching your datasets and finally write back the transformed data to CARTO.
  4. Integrate CARTO datasets in your ETL pipelines

    You can use your CARTO datasets within your ETL pipelines developed with tools like Talend. Using these tools you can transform and move your data in and out of your CARTO database and take advantage of the ETL tools capabilities to integrate CARTO with data warehouses like Snowflake and Vertica or cloud storage services like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.

How to get started

This feature is available right now to all enterprise customers. To start using it just go to the settings page in your dashboard and follow the instructions to set up a new connection. You can find information about the new Direct SQL Connection and tutorials for connecting with different applications in the help center. If you encounter any issues just reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

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