Toolkit and Topcat?

[kelle]

At AAS, someone mentioned to me how useful Topcat is to them for doing this type of data wrangling work. I'd like to discuss the interoperability/complimentary between this tool and Topcat. For example, How can use this tool to generate tables which load in Topcat?

[dr-rodriguez]

TOPCAT primarily works with tables. If you use AstrodbKit (or any tool) to export a query into a csv file or similar, TOPCAT should be able to open it.

It should be possible to run a local SAMP service (which TOPCAT starts by default) to have python send the output of a query directly into TOPCAT. See: https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/samp/index.html

The other way TOPCAT works well is via TAP which is a hosted service that sits on top of a Postgres database. That would be an excellent way to access the database as one could explore all the tables/columns and write custom queries, but it requires configuring and managing a TAP server.