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Public historic Census FAC data

This data is publicly distributed by Census as part of its operation of the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

It is converted to PostgreSQL here for use in a data/API pilot.

Process

  1. Raw .txt files were pulled from Census.
  2. The program line-by-line.py was run on those files, (lossily) removing any non-ASCII characters from the dataset.
  3. The program load-directly.py was run against a local Postgres stack to load the CSVs as tables.

Step 1: Download of files

What it says. These were pulled down year-by-year as zip archives of pipe-delimited CSVs. They were then placed in a set of directories named for the year.

by-year/
  | 2016
  | 2017
  | 2018
  | ...
  | 2022

Step 2: line-by-line

Our experience is that the public Census files are not generated with any consistency regarding character sets or encodings. As a result, the files alternately identify as CP-1252, latin-1, or cannot be identified at all. Many tools cannot read these files reliably.

We walk the files character-by-character, and throw out anything not within the range of ASCII text and punctuation. We're aware this is lossy, but we are engaged in a data pilot. Further, we could not find a more reliable way to process this data.

for i in `ls by-year` ; 
    do echo $i ; 
    python line-by-line.py --input by-year/$i --output cleaned/$i ; 
done

Step 3: load-directly

This uses a chunked load into Postgres tables via the Pandas df.to_sql() method.

for i in `ls by-year` ; 
    do echo $i ; 
    python load-directly.py --path cleaned/$i ; 
done

Step 4: Archive

The source data for the above was tar'd, gzip'd, and split.

split -b 10M by-year.tar.gz by-year/by-year.
split -b 10M cleaned.tar.gz cleaned/cleaned.

This is for reconstruction. cat back to a .tar.gz and decompress.

Step 5: Export

mkdir -p dumps
for table in `cat table-names.txt`; 
do 
    echo Dumping $table
    pg_dump -h localhost -U postgres -t $table postgres > dumps/$table.dump
done

Step 6: Split the dumps

To store them in GH, we need them to be smaller. They're compressed, then split.

tar cvzf dumps.tar.gz dumps/
rm -rf dumps
mkdir dumps
split -b 40M dumps.tar.gz dumps/dump.

Step 6: Container build

docker build -t fac/wait-and-load .

Step 7: Include in compose

This container is designed to run as part of the local and deployed container stack for the FAC. It will not do anything useful on its own.