Querying Illuminate

Illuminate uses PostgreSQL for storing all of your data. PostgreSQL was created in 1986 (which makes it older than me!) and yet I still love it. There are not many things I love from the 80’s. Madonna, Star Trek IV, Growing Pains, Oprah … booo. My favorite thing about Postgres, and SQL in general, is that you tell it what you want, not how to get it. This is what makes it a “declarative” language, and also what makes it so darn simple to quickly get the data you need.

In order for you to get the most out of this guide you will need to have some basic SQL knowledge and the ability to connect and run queries on an Illuminate database. If you are new to Postgres, and/or SQL in general I recommend starting here postgresguide.com (you will notice I shamelessly took the look and feel from this awesome website). If you do not have access to query Illuminate directly, see Getting Access.

This guide was created to solve a few problems:

• Illuminate is complex, there are thousands of tables and it is hard to know where to look for the data you need.
• There are some basic guidelines that I would like to share that can help you on your query adventures.
• Direct database access is something we at Illuminate should embrace more. You gain a lot of power by querying the database directly, however, you need help.
• I want to provide good example queries that will work out of the box. Having something to start with always makes it easier to learn.
• Give you a deeper understanding of how Illuminate operates. With this deeper understanding you are able to better help those that you serve.

All of the recommendations here are more like guidelines than rules. They are here to help you, not to restrict you.