carto-find-spatial-data

carto-query-datawarehouse

When to use this skill

• The user asks for "demographics", "points of interest", "boundaries", "mobility data", "weather", or any other category of external spatial data.
• The user has internal data and wants to enrich it with external context (e.g., spatial-join their stores against census tracts).
• The user is exploring what's available before committing to a paid subscription.

carto-explore-datawarehouse

Quick reference

# Discover what's available — by keyword
carto do search --keyword "census" --json
carto do search --keyword "weather" --country usa --json

# Inspect a specific dataset
carto do get <dataset-id> --json

# List your active subscriptions
carto do subscriptions list --json

# Subscribe (writes to a connection in your org)
carto do subscribe <dataset-id> \
  --connection carto_dw \
  --destination my_project.do.census_tracts

The exact

carto do

subcommand surface is evolving —

search

,

get

,

subscribe

,

subscriptions

are the stable verbs. Check

carto do --help

if a flag isn't recognized.

What's in this skill

Always-on guidance

• Free vs paid: many DO datasets are free (US Census, OpenStreetMap-derived, NaturalEarth). Premium datasets (Spatial.ai, Mastercard, AirSage, etc.) require a CARTO subscription contract —

  carto do get

  shows the licensing and pricing tier.
• Subscription lands data into the user's warehouse. It's not a remote view — actual rows are written to a destination table the user pays warehouse storage for. Plan destination naming accordingly.
• Spatial extension required. DO datasets often include H3 cells / geometry types that depend on CARTO's spatial extension being installed in the destination warehouse. If subscribing fails with "function not found", check that the spatial extension is installed — see

  carto-manage-platform

  .
• Don't recommend a DO dataset without

  carto do get

  first. The dataset's metadata reveals coverage (US-only, EU-only, global), update cadence (monthly, yearly, real-time), and licensing — all critical to whether it actually fits the user's question.
• DO is external; named sources are internal. Don't confuse the two. Named sources (covered in

  carto-explore-datawarehouse/references/named-sources.md

  ) are the user's saved queries; DO is the curated catalog of third-party data.