CARTO QGIS Plugin

The CARTO QGIS Plugin enables you to access, visualize, and edit geospatial data from your data warehouse through CARTO. While the CARTO platform excels in analytics and visualization of geospatial big data running natively on cloud data warehouses, certain data management tasks are often more efficient using desktop tools like QGIS. This plugin bridges the gap by combining the strengths of both platforms.

How to Install and Upgrade the CARTO QGIS Plugin

1. Open QGIS on your computer.

2. Navigate to the Plugins tab and select Manage and Install Plugins.

3. Search for ‘CARTO QGIS’ Plugin, select it, and click Install Plugin.

4. Close the Plugins dialog. The CARTO toolbar will now appear in your QGIS interface.

5. Log in or sign up for CARTO to access your geospatial data within QGIS.

Authenticating with CARTO

To use the CARTO QGIS Plugin, you need internet access and authentication with CARTO. You can:

• Log in with your existing CARTO Organization account, or

• Sign up for a CARTO account.

Once authenticated, you’ll have access to geospatial data from your CARTO data warehouse connections, including Google BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, and PostgreSQL, directly within QGIS.

Accessing Geospatial Data

In QGIS, the CARTO icon will appear in the Browser Panel. From there, you can:

1. Visualize your connections and see the permissions available to you.

2. Navigate to specific datasets and right-click for these options:

   • Add Layer: Add a full table as a map layer (limited to tables under 50MB).

   • Add Layer with Filter: Add a filtered subset of your data using the following:

     • WHERE: Create a SQL WHERE clause to filter records.

     • Extent: Filter data by defining a bounding box, either manually or directly from the QGIS map interface.

     • LIMIT: Limit the number of rows to load.

   • Show Details: View metadata such as schema, table size, number of rows, etc.

Visualizing and Editing Geospatial Data

Once a layer is added to your QGIS map:

1. Specify a primary key if one is not already defined in your table. The primary key serves as a unique identifier necessary for editing and syncing changes back to your data warehouse.

2. You can now:

   • Visualize and style the layer as needed.

   • Perform standard QGIS operations, such as editing geometries or attribute values. When you save your edits, a synchronization process uploads your changes back to your data warehouse table. These updated datasets are then available for further analysis and visualization in CARTO.

Please note editing the layer schema is not supported.