What are people using to access the data from Canvas Data Portal?

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samson_chung
Community Member

Hi all,

I have just gain access to the Canvas Data portal last week and have been exploring it. From what I can tell so far, it is a tab delimited file stored inside a gz file. 

Excel can to a certain point understand the Tab delimitation but it is not the best tool, so I am wondering what everyone else is using to access the data in those files. 

Thanks,

Sc.

1 Solution
James
Community Champion

 @samson_chung  

A relational database. Canvas uses Postgresql on the backend, but you can use MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle (has some problems with long field names), Informix, etc. Basically, whatever database system you're already using, but if you're talking "Excel" be prepared for the difficulties of big data. People who can afford it may use Amazon Redshift since that eliminates the need to host and manage the data locally.

Excel cannot handle the size of some of the tables. Excel also has issues with the IDs, which are bigInt unless they are imported as strings instead of numbers, but they aren't by default so it's problematic. Tableau likewise had problems with the bigInt fields (that may have been recently fixed, but I can't find the announcement I thought I read about it).

For additional information about getting Canvas Data loaded, please see these threads.

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