ADQL tricks at MPIA

The 2017-06-29 ADQL talk (red circle) from 30000 ft

Today I was up on Heidelberg's signature mountain, Königstuhl, at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy for a little talk on what I'd provisionally call “intermediate ADQL” – discussing some aspects of ADQL and some TAP techniques that may not be immediately obvious but still generally and straightforwardly applicable to everyday problems. Since I suspect the lecture notes for that talk may be of interest to some readers of this blog, I thought I should share them here.

What this also contains is a very quick piece of pyVO-based python (which needs both this helper and a recent pyVO) for a use case that comes up fairly often: “Give me all proper motions (radio fluxes, distances, radial velocities, whatever) for object in this region.”

This uses a discovery case I've been after for quite a while now: Find services by the UCDs of tables within them. And while that's been possible for quite a while on GAVO's Registry UI WIRR, there's still too many services that don't declare their tables to the Registry, and when talking about TAP, the situation is still a bit worse (as has been mentioned in my account of the last interop). So – enjoy the code, but very frankly, you'll still see wires sticking out for a several months yet.

And if you run a TAP service yourself, please have a look at how to enable table discovery over on the IVOA wiki so we can finally get those pesky wires out of our users' eyes.