Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018 and is now the Data and Insights division of Tyler. The platform is still powered by the same software formerly known as Socrata but you will see references to Data & Insights going forward.

New geospatial functions, $having parameter

Just in time for National Day of Civic Hacking, we’ve got some great new SoQL functionality for you:

We’ve added three new geospatial SoQL functions that will help you manage the complexity of geospatial data:

  • num_points(...) will count the vertices in a geospatial datatype, to help you understand the complexity of shapes and lines
  • simplify(...) allows you to then take a geometry and reduce the number of vertices to make it more compact
  • simplify_preserve_topology(...) performs the same task as simplify(...), but avoids the problem of oversimplification

We’ve also released the $having SoQL query parameter, which will allow you to filter the results of an aggregation, after the aggregation has been performed. Yet another handy SQL feature brought to open data with SoQL!