Advanced Settings
The Lyftron Provider for Quandl uses an APIKey for authentication. Additionally, you can set the DatabaseCode connection property to the code identifying the Database whose Datasets you want to query with SQL. You can search the available Databases by querying the Databases view.
Get an API Key
To obtain the API key, log in to Quandl and click API KEY in your Account Settings. The generated APIKey is displayed.
Authenticate to Quandl
You will need the following parameters to connect to and retrieve data from Quandl:
- APIKey: The API key from your account.
- DatabaseCode: The Database code that represents the Database to work with. For example, WIKI.
It is also recommended but not required to specify the CacheLocation and CacheMetadata. This is a folder on disk where Quandl metadata files will be stored. To ensure fast load times when listing metadata about tables, it is best to set this property.
Get Data
After setting the APIKey, the basic flow for getting data is the following:
-
Use the Databases view to get a list of Databases.
Note: The DatabaseCode is not needed in the connection string to query this view.
- Set the code value of the Database you want to the DatabaseCode connection property.
- Use the Datasets view to get a list of Datasets.
You can now execute SELECT queries to any of the tables in the list.
Customizing the SSL Configuration
By default, the provider attempts to negotiate SSL/TLS by checking the server's certificate against the system's trusted certificate store. To specify another certificate, see the SSLServerCert property for the available formats to do so.
Connecting Through a Firewall or Proxy
HTTP Proxies
To connect through the Windows system proxy, you do not need to set any additional connection properties. To connect to other proxies, set ProxyAutoDetect to false.
In addition, to authenticate to an HTTP proxy, set ProxyAuthScheme, ProxyUser, and ProxyPassword, in addition to ProxyServer and ProxyPort.
Other Proxies
Set the following properties:
- To use a proxy-based firewall, set FirewallType, FirewallServer, and FirewallPort.
- To tunnel the connection, set FirewallType to TUNNEL.
- To authenticate, specify FirewallUser and FirewallPassword.
- To authenticate to a SOCKS proxy, additionally set FirewallType to SOCKS5.
Troubleshooting the Connection
To show provider activity from query execution to network traffic, use Logfile and Verbosity. The examples of common connection errors below show how to use these properties to get more context. Contact the support team for help tracing the source of an error or circumventing a performance issue.
- Authentication errors: Typically, recording a Logfile at Verbosity 4 is necessary to get full details on an authentication error.
- Queries time out: A server that takes too long to respond will exceed the provider's client-side timeout. Often, setting the Timeout property to a higher value will avoid a connection error. Another option is to disable the timeout by setting the property to 0. Setting Verbosity to 2 will show where the time is being spent.
- The certificate presented by the server cannot be validated: This error indicates that the provider cannot validate the server's certificate through the chain of trust. If you are using a self-signed certificate, there is only one certificate in the chain.
To resolve this error, you must verify yourself that the certificate can be trusted and specify to the provider that you trust the certificate. One way you can specify that you trust a certificate is to add the certificate to the trusted system store; another is to set SSLServerCert.