td_build: Rebuild taxadb snapshots from the providers

In taxadb: A High-Performance Taxonomic Database Interface

Rebuild taxadb snapshots from the providers

Description

Runs a provider's preprocessing end to end: fetch the provider's own distribution, normalize it to the taxadb Darwin Core schema, and write the Parquet snapshot.

Usage

td_build(
  provider = "itis",
  version = format(Sys.Date(), "%Y"),
  dir = build_dir(),
  validate = TRUE,
  db = td_connect(),
  ...
)

Arguments

provider	one or more providers to build. See taxadb_providers().
version	the snapshot version to write, defaults to the year.
dir	directory for build inputs and outputs, see build_dir().
validate	should each table be checked with td_validate() after it is written? Default TRUE.
db	a duckdb connection
...	passed to the individual provider builder, e.g. archive to use an already-downloaded copy.

Details

Snapshots are published for the providers so that most users never need to run this. It is here so that a user who needs a fresher snapshot than the published one, or who wants to check how a table was derived, can rebuild it themselves rather than asking someone to.

Builds are done entirely in duckdb, out of core, so they are bounded by disk rather than memory. The archives are large: COL and GBIF are around 500MB and 1GB compressed respectively, and are cached in dir between builds.

Value

a data.frame of the validation results, invisibly if validate is FALSE the paths written.

Examples

## Not run: 
## rebuild one provider
td_build("itis")

## rebuild everything that can be built without credentials
td_build(taxadb_providers())

## End(Not run)

taxadb documentation built on Aug. 31, 2026, 5:07 p.m.