basic help downloading data

[Ignacio Requena (irequena24)]

Greetings, I am a bit familiar with Overture Maps data and downloading data from an AWS server. I overlooked at Overture's guide on how to download their data, and I made it as far as installing AWS on my computer. I am unsure how to launch the application. Ultimately, I want to download floorspace information for all commercial buildings in California.

Crossing my fingers someone sees this post!

Thank you

Iggy

[Matt Travis (mtravis)]

Ignacio Requena (@irequena24) I would take a look here to start with

https://docs.overturemaps.org/getting-data/duckdb/?query=Buildings

You only need DuckDB installed. This allows you to scan the s3 bucket for the only the data you need. You could download the entire buildings dataset using the aws cli but that's 230GB.

Let us know how you get on.

[Ignacio Requena (irequena24)]

Hey there, thanks for your reply. So I accessed the link you sent, and then clicked on Install DuckDB, which took me to this link. I then copied the download link using the following parameters:

• Version: Stable release
• Environment: Command Line
• Platform: macOS
• Download method: direct download

This downloaded duckdb.exec . After opening it, I kept following the directions from the link you sent. I typed "install spatial" and "install httpfs" and nothing happened. I tried typing ".help" for usage hints. Please check out the screenshot. I think I may be missing something?

I also tried through Python and it seems to be working except that I need an Azure key. I went back to Overture's documentation on how to access data through AWS and Azure. Its all great except that they both require a paid subscription. I thought this data was free?

[Matt Travis (mtravis)]

Ignacio Requena (@irequena24) hey there. A little quirk with DuckDB is that you have to finish a line that runs SQL or a function you have to finish with a semi-colon. You also need to load spatial as well as install.

So this will work

install spatial;
load spatial;
COPY(                             
      SELECT
         id,
         names.primary as name,
         confidence AS confidence,
         CAST(socials AS JSON) as socials,    -- Ensure each attribute can be serialized to JSON
         geometry                             -- DuckDB understands this to be a geometry type
      FROM read_parquet('s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-02-19.0/theme=places/type=place/*', filename=true, hive_partitioning=1)
      WHERE categories.primary = 'pizza_restaurant'
      AND bbox.xmin BETWEEN -75 AND -73       -- Only use the bbox min values
      AND bbox.ymin BETWEEN 40 AND 41         -- because they are point geometries.
  
  ) TO 'nyc_pizza.geojson' WITH (FORMAT GDAL, DRIVER 'GeoJSON');

You can also place it all in a SQL file and run duckdb -f query.sql in the latest version

Hope that helps.

[Matt Travis (mtravis)]

Ignacio Requena (@irequena24) and by the way if you use .help on it's own as soon as you open DuckDB then that should work. Though I would just out their docs too.

[Ignacio Requena (irequena24)]

Hi Matt, that worked! I have one final question. I have a list of coordinates that represent the epicenter of buildings (community health centers). I am only interested in finding out the height of each of these buildings. There are about 2,500 of these points located in California. Is there a way to request this information?

[Ignacio Requena (irequena24)]

Hi Matt, just following up on this. I was wondering if its possible to download building information for all of the US. When I tried downloading for the entire state of California through DuckDB, the downloading process capped me at 15 GB.