Precog for PostgreSQL is a free release that swaps out Precog's native data store for PostgreSQL, effectively using PostgreSQL as a disk drive from which data is loaded. The data is translated on-the-fly into a format that Precog can work with.
Precog for PostgreSQL gives you the ability to analyze all the data in your PostgreSQL database, without forcing you to export data into another tool or write any custom code.
The following sections contain a short guide for getting started with Precog for PostgreSQL. You'll be up and running in minutes!
The download is a ZIP file that contains the following files:
The file precog.jar is the Java JAR that bundles all of the Precog dependencies into a single (really big!) file. The files precog.sh and precog.bat are scripts that launch precog.jar.
The file config.cfg contains configuration information.
All the configuration settings for Precog are stored in the file config.cfg, with reasonable defaults.
There are two things you need to do at a minimum before you can launch Precog:
Tell Precog the location of your database(s)
Tell Precog what the master account is.
To tell Precog the location of the database(s), simply edit the databases section under queryExecutor:
queryExecutor {
databases {
local = "jdbc:postgresql://localhost/test"
}
}
The format of each line is
<database name> = <JDBC PostgreSQL URL>
Where jdbc:postgresql://<host>/<postgresql database name> (see the
PostgreSQL JDBC
reference
for more details on the syntax).
For optimal performance, you should launch Precog on the same machine that is running the PostgreSQL server.
To tell Precog what the master account is, edit config.cfg and edit the following settings under the masterAccount section:
security {
masterAccount {
apiKey = "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789abc"
}
}
The API key for the master account can be anything you like, but you should treat it securely because whoever has it has full access to your database.
You may also want to tweak the ports that Precog uses for the web server that exposes the Precog REST API and to serve labcoat:
server {
port = 8888
}
...
labcoat {
port = 8000
}
To run precog.jar, you will need to install JRE 6 or later (many systems already have Java installed). If you’re on an OS X or Linux machine, just run the precog.sh script, which automatically launches Java. If you’re on a Windows machine, you can launch Precog with the precog.bat script.
Once Precog has been launched, it will start a web server that exposes the Analytics REST API as well as labcoat.
Once Precog is running, you have full access to the Precog Analytics REST API. However, you will need to load data into PostgreSQL using standard SQL insertion outside of Precog. That is, you cannot use the Precog Ingest API to load data into PostgreSQL because Precog for PostgreSQL does not bundle the auth, accounts or ingest services. To obtain access to the rest of the Precog REST API you will need to sign-up for an account and use the cloud-based service. You can find a large number of open source client libraries available on Github, and the Precog developers site contains documentation and tutorials for interacting with the API.
Labcoat is an HTML5 application that comes bundled in the download. You don’t have to use Labcoat, of course, since Precog has a REST API, but Labcoat is the best way to interactively explore your data and develop Quirrel queries.
The precog.jar comes with a bundled web server for labcoat, so once it’s running just point your browser at http://localhost:8000/ (or whatever port you’ve configured it for) and you’ll have a new labcoat IDE pointing at your local Precog REST API.
Once you’ve got Labcoat running, you’re all set! You should see your PostgreSQL databases and tables in the file system explorer, and you can query data from the tables, develop queries to analyze the data, and export queries as code that run against your Precog server.
Precog is a beta product, and Precog for PostgreSQL is hot off the press. You may encounter a few rough corners, and if so, we’d love to hear about them (just send an email to support@precog.com).
Due to technical limitations, we only recommend the product for exploratory data analysis. For developers interested in high-performance analytics on their PostgreSQL data, we recommend our cloud-based analytics solution and the PostgreSQL data importer, which can nicely complement existing PostgreSQL installations for analytic-intensive workloads.
Have fun analyzing!