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Author: cyyeh

packages/doc/blog/query-data-from-the-internet-and-deliver-apis-in-no-time.mdx

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+---
+date: 2023-08-30
+authors:
+  name: Jimmy Yeh
+  title: core member of VulcanSQL
+  url: https://github.com/cyyeh
+  image_url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/11023068?v=4
+  email: jimmy.yeh@cannerdata.com
+---
+
+# Query Data from the Internet and Deliver APIs in no time
+
+*TLDR: VulcanSQL, a free and open-source data API framework built specifically for data applications, 
+empowers data professionals to generate and distribute data APIs quickly and effortlessly. 
+It takes your SQL templates and transforms them into data APIs, with no backend expertise necessary.*
+
+## One Way to Understand APIs
+
+As an API designer, we can think of APIs composed of three components, namely **input**, **transformation** and **output**.
+
+Let's start with the input component, we need to consider what are data sources of APIs. Generally, data sources 
+can be databases, files on the FTP server, etc. After we decide what data sources our APIs support, we need to
+also support different mechanisms in order to get data from data sources.
+
+Then, with the transformation part, it generally is where we handle business logic. Finally, the output part means the destination
+of the APIs and also the mechanisms we deliver the APIs, such as RESTful APIs, GraphQL, etc.
+
+Now, let me take VulcanSQL as a quick example, it emphasizes you can write SQL templates in the transformation part, 
+and it currently supports RESTful APIs for the output part. As of the input, please read the following content to grasp the full story! 
+
+![vulcansql](./static/query-data-from-the-internet-and-deliver-apis-in-no-time/vulcansql.png)
+
+<!--truncate-->
+
+## The Input Part: Data Sources
+
+VulcanSQL aims to help data professionals create and deliver data APIs in an easy way! 
+Originally, VulcanSQL supports data warehouses and some databases such as BigQuery, 
+Snowflake, ClickHouse and PostgreSQL, etc. However, as we share VulcanSQL to the world 
+along the way, we figured out that there are also lots of data on the Internet that is not in databases 
+such as CSV files or data that lives in other people's databases!
+
+That's what we're going to share with you next: how VulcanSQL can help you get data from the Internet! 
+
+## How VulcanSQL can help?
+
+As of now, VulcanSQL provides two mechanisms to help you get data from the Internet.
+
+### DuckDB and its httpfs extension
+
+In VulcanSQL, we can use [DuckDB](../docs/connectors/duckdb) as a caching layer to enhance query performance, or as a data connector. 
+For those of you who may not familiar with DuckDB, it is a high performance in-process OLAP database, 
+and has lots of extensions available! In order to get data from the Internet, VulcanSQL supports the httpfs extension!
+
+With the [httpfs extension](https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/httpfs.html), now VulcanSQL can query CSV, JSON and Parquet files from the Internet!
+
+Imagine now you find some interesting dataset on the Internet, and it's a CSV file! Now you can directly query them
+like the following SQL statement, then you can do some data transformation using SQL, and deliver APIs right away to share with others!
+
+```sql
+SELECT 
+  *
+FROM 'https://www.stats.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Annual-enterprise-survey/Annual-enterprise-survey-2021-financial-year-provisional/Download-data/annual-enterprise-survey-2021-financial-year-provisional-csv.csv'
+```
+
+If you would like to read the source code of the full example, please [check out here](https://github.com/Canner/vulcan-sql-examples/tree/main/read-data-from-internet)!
+
+### The API Extension
+
+Sometimes, you may find some interesting data behind RESTful APIs created by others. VulcanSQL now has [the API extension](../docs/extensions/api) that
+allows you to query data from 3rd parties using RESTful APIs!
+
+In the following example, we call the RESTful API to `https://dummyjson.com` and search their products with a query string!
+
+```sql
+{% set a_variable_you_can_define = { "query": { "q": "phone" }  } %}
+SELECT {{ a_variable_you_can_define | rest_api(url='https://dummyjson.com/products/search') }}
+```
+
+Besides, the API Extension not only supports the GET method, but also other HTTP methods as well!
+
+If you would like to read the source code of the full example, please [check out here](https://github.com/Canner/vulcan-sql-examples/tree/main/restapi-caller).
+
+## Conclusion
+
+We hope this blog post demonstrates how VulcanSQL can help you query data from the Internet, thus you can create and deliver APIs in no time!