Data Observatory

Data Catalog

The Data Observatory section of the Workspace allows users to find the best data for their use case among the thousands of spatial datasets available in the CARTO’s Spatial Data Catalog.

The Data Observatory homepage

The Data Observatory catalog is also accessible publicly at carto.com/data

From the Spatial Data Catalog, you can:

• Explore the catalog to find the data that best suits your needs.

• Access free samples of most public and premium datasets.

• Subscribe to any of our public datasets or submit requests to start the licensing process of premium datasets from our vetted data sources.

Your subscriptions and samples

Your subscriptions and samples can be accessed through any of your Data Warehouse connections, including the CARTO Data Warehouse (which is used by default, where available). The access method depends on which warehouse you're using:

• CARTO Data Warehouse: You will find a Data Observatory (US) folder with all your samples and subscriptions. Learn more about the CARTO Data Warehouse structure.

Data Observatory subscriptions will be served from the US multi-region in the CARTO Data Warehouse. If your CARTO organization is deployed in another region, you should consider requesting a transfer to your own region for improved interoperability.

• BigQuery connections: Once subscribed, your connections will automatically gain access to a BigQuery project called carto-data , which will contain a dataset with all the samples and subscriptions available in your account. This dataset will be located in the US multi-region — if you need a different region, please request a transfer as covered in Access data in BigQuery.

• Other data warehouses: Admins can request a transfer of their organization's Data Observatory datasets to their own data warehouses. Follow our dedicated guides for more details:

  • Access data in Snowflake

  • Access data in Redshift

  • Access data in Databricks

  • Access data in PostgreSQL

Admins can view and manage all of their organization's subscriptions and samples from the Data Observatory settings, including monitoring status, requesting transfers to different data warehouses or regions, and deleting subscriptions. For more information, see our section on the Data Observatory settings.