Happy PostGIS day!

Summary

Happy PostGIS day! Connect CARTO to Franchise, a SQL tool with a notebook interface. Analyze and visualize your PostGIS data seamlessly.

This post may describe functionality for an old version of CARTO. Find out about the latest and cloud-native version here.
Happy PostGIS day!

At CARTO we <3 PostGIS. And we love PostGIS not only because it's a fully-fledged geospatial analytics engine but because being at the roots of our technology it helps us building tools to help companies and individuals better understand their geospatial data through Location Intelligence.

Recently  we have found out Franchise. Franchise is a SQL tool with a notebook interface  built by some colleagues at MIT. It is used to explore your data in PostgreSQL  BigQuery  MySQL and other databases by means of SQL queries.

Wouldn't it be cool having a SQL notebook not only to explore  but also to visualise and style your geospatial analysis against PostGIS using CARTO?

It is  and celebrating the PostGIS day  as part of our "leapfrog Fridays" we are adding support for CARTO in Franchise.

How it works

It's dead simple.

  1. Connect to CARTO with your user credentials. It works both with personal or enterprise accounts.
  2. Choose one of your CARTO datasets and write your analysis in the SQL console.
  3. Open the CARTO View  style and visualise

You can of course nest queries  export and share your SQL notebooks.

     
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How it's done

There are a couple of cool things to remark about this integration of CARTO in Franchise.

First of all this is an example on the power of CARTO Engine. For this specific case we are using our SQL and Maps APIs to leverage the power of CARTO via a SQL notebook.

     

Franchise CARTO SQL notebook

 


That means there's a fully functional PostGIS SQL console and CartoCSS panel embedded  so you can take the most not only of PostGIS functions  but also of our Data Services API or Data Observatory

     

Franchise CARTO SQL notebook

 


And second  Franchise is a React application  and you know what that means. We have taken the opportunity to integrate CARTO.js as a React component.

About this  there's still some work to do to have a general purpose CARTO.js React component  but serve this as an example on how to integrate CARTO.js in your own React applications.

Stay tunned for more news about this in the following weeks ;)

Where to start

Again  dead simple  if you have a CARTO account just use your credentials  otherwise you can sign up for an account here

Then  just run locally an instance of Franchise with this Docker image or if you prefer use our cloud instance.

And that's it  happy PostGIS day!

If you liked this post you might be interested in joining us.

Kudos to Guillermo Webster for bringing Franchise to life.