Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the CFA Data Release 6

SDSSQUERY - make direct Sloan SQL query

The sdssquery program, located in /data/oiropt/bin, is a small shell script that uses a Sloan-provided Python script to send an SQL query to the SDSS SkyServer via the Web, returning the output on STDOUT as a Starbase table.

The Skyserver has row and time limits on this kind of Web query. Currently a query will be aborted if it takes longer than 90 seconds or returns more than 100,000 rows.

Example:

The command (split across lines for clarity - the command is a single line):

    sdssquery '
       select ra, dec, type, petroMag_r, petroMag_i
       from PhotoPrimary 
       where type != 3 and  
          objID between 587727177912614921 and 587727177912614940
    ' | 
    justify

which produces:

    ra              dec             type    petroMag_r      petroMag_i
    -----------     ----------      ----    ----------      ----------
    4.107212E-3     -11.209926         6        16.707          16.534
    6.990937E-3     -11.096008         6        10.823          12.727
    0.012425        -11.098176         6        22.245          20.815

Note that when the SQL query has shell wildcard characters, it will have to be quoted or the characters individually escaped.

[getobjid] [getspecid] [footserver] [sdssquery]