📈 Accessible Blockchain Information with Pulsar's Indexing Service
At Pulsar, we are dedicated to providing personalized and beneficial data to our users. In order to achieve this goal, we provide internal indexers that can be accessed via Rest, WebSocket, and soon, GraphQL APIs, as well as an SDK in Python and NodeJS, enabling users to access dependable information quickly. Furthermore, we aim to allow users to develop custom indexers for the data they require, and to give them access to it via GraphQL queries.
🌊 Connecting Indexers to the Data Lake
The two types of indexers, internal and custom, will be connected to a data lake that serves as the core for all information hosted in Pulsar. Along with real-time information from the indexers, the data lake will also contain raw and parsed blockchain data. With this vast amount of data, we plan to enable users to create custom dashboards, providing analysts with a better understanding of the current state of the cryptocurrency world across all chains supported on our platform. For example, a dashboard could have visualizations showing the market capitalization of different coins, the volume of transactions for each coin and the price trends over time. Additionally, we are developing a SQL SDK that will enable users to create bespoke queries on the entirety of Pulsar's data lake, providing users of our service with access to new advanced data analysis and insights.
⌛️ Real-Time vs Historical Data
The main distinction between the information provided by our custom indexers and the SQL SDK is their availability and longevity. While the entities generated by the custom indexers, and therefore the data fetched by the GraphQL queries, offer real-time data, they expire after 7 days. On the other hand, the SQL SDK has a minimum delay of 1 hour due to synchronization between the Cassandra databases and the data lake, but it retains all historical data.
🤔 Choosing the Best Option
Our approach enables us to utilize both real-time and historical data applications of our indexers. When users require the latest data, our indexers provide quick access. However, for use cases that do not require the latest data, our SQL SDK can provide all necessary information starting from the beginning of the chain. Users can choose whichever option best fits their needs.