Accessing the Gaia Archive

The imminent Gaia Data Release 3 contains a wealth of data, including new products likeextended objects and non-single stars. This rich and complex dataset is distributed acrossmore than fifty tables that are directly accessible using the Astronomical Data Query Lan-guage (ADQL), except for the massive data products. They are the epoch photometry, thetime averaged spectra, and the MCMC samples that have been computed during the objectclassification procedure, and all of them can be retrieved via a dedicated server that im-plements the IVOA DataLink protocol. Exploring and analysing the numerous catalogueshosted by the Gaia Archive in an efficient manner is not trivial, and this is the reason whythe Archive team is continuously developing dedicated tools, functionalities, and tutorials.This session will begin with an overview of the Archive contents, with a strong emphasis onthe Help pages that contain useful examples, references, and tips. Then I will show you howto write efficient ADQL queries, retrieve different products, and use the Astroquery.GaiaPython package that is being developed at ESA/ESAC.