Data Explorer

The Stack Exchange Data Explorer is a tool for executing arbitrary SQL queries against data from the various question and answer sites in the Stack Exchange network.

Quick Guide

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2015 or later
• .NET Framework 4.7
• SQL Server 2012 Express or later/higher
• IIS7 or later
  • The URL Rewrite 2.0 extension is required for OData endpoint support. If you don't need this, you can comment out the <rewrite> section in web.config.

Layout

• The App directory contains the Data Explorer solution
• The Migrations directory contains the database evolution scripts and a batch file for running them
• The Tools directory contains some precompiled utilities for working with Data Explorer
• The Lib directory contains some 3rd party binaries used in the application
• The SeedData directory contains seed files to populate the Data Explorer schema with some sample data

Configuration

The database can be brought up to date by running the migrate.local.bat file in the Migrations directory. This assumes an existing SQL Server database named DataExplorer with integrated security enabled. If your environment is configured differently, you will need to modify the connection string in your batch file and web.config file to reflect your setup.

Once done, you'll need to populate the Sites table with a record for each site you intend to query against. You can run the sites.sql file in the SeedData directory to prepopulate the table with a small list of popular Stack Exchange sites. To actually run queries, you will need to create additional databases that reflect the connection values in the Sites table; these can optionally be populated with data from the Stack Exchange data dumps using a custom import process or one of the data dump import tools available on Stack Apps.

Contributing

Development

• Install git, or a git client of your choosing (such as TortoiseGit, SourceTree, or GitHub Desktop)
• Fork this repository on GitHub
• Commit changes to your fork, preferably in easy-to-merge branches
• Submit a pull request on GitHub with a description of your changes

Providing Feedback

• Submit bugs, feature requests, and support questions on Meta Stack Exchange or create a new GitHub issue.

Miscellaneous

Third Party Components

• ASP.NET MVC 5
• MiniProfiler
• Dapper
• jQuery
• CodeMirror
• SlickGrid (currently using a fork for updates)
• Flot
• StackExchange.Exceptional
• Json.NET
• DotNetOpenAuth
• reCAPTCHA

For more information, see "Which tools and technologies are used to build Data Explorer?"