Get Some! Query MLB Gameday Data with OData and Tableau Public
Cross-post from the original article I published on synergy.linium.com.
Baseball. If is ANY sport in America that is "all about the data", it's baseball. Although we touched on this topic last year, I never really gave it its full round of posts that it deserves.
Well, finally that day has come - except now its even better.
This time, you don't have to do ANYTHING! Just consume the data we've already harvested (and will continue to harvest).
We have made our MLB Gameday pitch-by-pitch data available as a FREE OData stream.
Tableau and even Tableau Public support OData... so, obviously, we expect you guys to build some very cool things with it. Yes? Good.
That sounds great, Ryan, but What exactly *IS* OData?
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open web protocol for querying and updating data. The protocol allows for a consumer to query a datasource over the HTTP protocol and get the result back in formats like Atom, JSON or plain XML, including pagination, ordering or filtering of the data.
Many of the building blocks that make up OData are standardized via Atom and AtomPub. The OData specification is available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP). Microsoft has released an OData software development kit (SDK) consisting of libraries for .NET, PHP, Java, JavaScript, webOS, and the iPhone.
Thank you, Wikipedia For more info, check out OData.org.
A word of warning - The data can be quite complex and there is a LOT of it. Be careful with your filters, or you could be trying to stream gigs worth of data all at once. This stream is also in its infancy - we will be adding tables and views that make it MUCH EASIER to decipher and understand - however, these tables here now, will remain unchanged - they are pretty much the base of the GameDay xml data (where it all comes from) - with the exception of the 'salaries' table that comes from Newsweek.com.
Here is the "official" link to the Gameday data... more coming very soon (plus an explanation of Gameday fields).
http://odata.linium.com/Gameday/Gameday.svc/
Have fun!
