Working with private data in Observable

What you will build in this guide

time required: 2 minutes

Observable notebooks are a great way to make sense of data in general. In this guide, we query a bank account statement and plot the results while keeping both our Splitgraph repository and Observable notebook private.

Forking the Observable notebook

Open the Observable notebook. The charts display publicly available sample data. To create your own private copy, click on the ... menu and select Fork as shown in the screen recording.

Import your own data

If you want to analyze your own data, you can Upload an account statement CSV. Most banks have similar CSV formats, though the column names may need to be updated if you are not using Revolut. Be sure to set the repository's visibility to private.

The fully qualified table name of your data will be different than what's in the original notebook. In your own freshly created copy, set tableName to the correct value.

Configuring the Database connection in Observable

First, head over to the SQL Credentials page and create a username and password for Observable.

Then, register a new database in Observable as shown in the screen recording:

That's all!

Any time you need to analyze private data using Splitgraph and Observable, just

• Upload the data to Splitgraph (make sure the repository is private).
• Create the database object in your Observable notebook, e.g.: db = DatabaseClient("Splitgraph DDN");
• Query Splitgraph: db.query("SELECT 1")