SQL on Ethereum Blockchain with Presto

https://github.com/xiaoyao1991/presto-ethereum

by xiaoyao • 9 years ago

153 41 9 years ago

github.com

AlwaysBCoding• 9 years ago

Business model for you: Host a node yourself, and charge a micropayment in ETH to make SQL queries against the DB.

granda• 9 years ago

How do you account for the cost of the transaction itself? Those aren't cheap.

meesterdude• 9 years ago

Querying the blockchain does not cost anything, just making changes to it. Otherwise, verifying transactions would be a recursive cost. I could be wrong though, but pretty sure since it's distributed reads are free, writes are where it costs.

tylersmith2• 9 years ago

The tech isn't quite here yet but payment channels would be a good solution.

WaxProlix2• 9 years ago

Interesting - Presto-As-A-Service is hard to do because of the way it handles permissions / auth. With an inherently shared resource like a blockchain it becomes a lot more feasible.

pweissbrod• 9 years ago

If im not mistaken presto-as-a-service is the power behind aws athena. They charge by the bytes scanned.

brepl• 9 years ago

Is this a JDBC connector for Ethereum? If so, that's neat. Ethereum APIs are generally awful, so a known, sane language for interacting with the blockchain has to be welcome.

herval• 9 years ago

It’s a Presto (prestodb.io) plugin - presto is a tool to do SQL queries over data sources (hadoop, nosql dbs, sql dbs, etc), including joining over them

Presto itself has a JDBC driver, so you could run it + this plugin in a Java app/codebase

leddt2• 9 years ago

Those gif are quite annoying to read and don't add anything of value. Static images, or even plain text, would be a lot better.

Edit: Sorry for the negativity. I created a PR for it. https://github.com/xiaoyao1991/presto-ethereum/pull/8

megalodon• 9 years ago

I agree and your comment didn't come off as negative to me.

detaro• 9 years ago

Agreed. Since they only show single commands and no animation etc, plain text would be better.

xiaoyao5• 9 years ago

Thanks for the PR, and it's merged, but the gif is still animated though. I'll update with still images later in the day.

leddt2• 9 years ago

I think that's a caching issue

Phlow• 9 years ago

Oh look, another Ethereum post.

Nope, still not putting money/time here, sorry.

ahallock• 9 years ago

Please enlighten us why.

jameskegel• 9 years ago

For myself, it's a matter of integrity. As an early holder, I was enamored with the idea, and took "Code is law" at face value. The response to the DAO incident alienated me. I don't have any ill will, and I'm not saying it's a scam or that you shouldn't get any, I'm just saying it is not for me.

tsukaisute• 9 years ago

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the other posts as to what this is.

Simply, it is an adapter that lets you use SQL syntax to introspect Ethereum blockchain data (blocks, and transactions.) Typically people do this using a JS API built into the node software [1], and it may/may not be ones' cup of tea.

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API

xiaoyao5• 9 years ago

Yes, and with presto you can join tables from different sources. So you can join ethereum data with whatever you want, be it a mysql table of accounts in observations, etc.

Animats3• 9 years ago

Oh, they loaded the Etherium blockchain into an SQL database. Easy. From the title, it appeared that someone had figured out how to represent an SQL database in the blockchain using the virtual machine for contracts. That would be hard.

As I've pointed out before, smart contracts need atomic transactions. Either everything commits, or nothing commits. This is a basic property needed for accounting systems.

xiaoyao5• 9 years ago

It's not loaded into a SQL database. You can think of Presto as simply as a SQL query engine. It sources data from Ethereum and run queries on it.

DennisP4• 9 years ago

Transactions on Ethereum are atomic. If something throws, everything rolls back.

There's one well-known exception, which is that if your contract sends ETH to another contract, invoking its fallback function, then a throw in the callee just means the call returns false. So in that particular case you have to check the return value and rethrow to make it atomic; this sounds crazy but in some circumstances you don't actually want to throw. The compiler gives you a warning if you don't check.

Animats3• 9 years ago

Didn't the DAO hack happen because someone found a way to make an "atomic" transaction fail without full rollback?

simondedalus2• 9 years ago

not only would it be hard, but using a blockchain (a type of database) to represent a functional SQL database using smart contracts is a mind-numbingly bad idea.

(insert "should i use a blockchain" infographic, which is amusingly impossible to google image search for, because this question evidently does not often occur to people...)

ah-• 9 years ago

https://github.com/pixelspark/catena

misterdata• 9 years ago

That might just depend on what parts of a "SQL database" you'd implement using a blockchain, and on the application type. You could e.g. segregate the data and only use the blockchain to authorize or timestamp transactions, for instance. In the latter case, Blockchain is just another consensus layer, and all distributed databases need one. See also https://github.com/pixelspark/catena, which uses the blockchain like a replication journal, logging only mutating queries and providing authorization based on public key crypto (disclosure: I am the author).

foota2• 9 years ago

I've been thinking about building API's for interaction with the off chain world, it seems like this is something with interest?

xiaoyao5• 9 years ago

Can you elaborate more? What specifically about offchain world?

foota2• 9 years ago

My first thought was sending email.

buremba• 9 years ago

The compute abstraction of Presto query engine is great, we have been working on a similar project based on Presto: https://enginesql.com/ (Shameless plug)

thedaemon• 9 years ago

Presto is the in house 3d software used by Pixar. I came here and was very confused. Do we not Google search our software's name before assigning it?

SQL on Ethereum Blockchain with Presto

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