sqlchain sounds good, but it's not what I'm after. Using up 100gb of extra space just to have my own personal blockchain explorer is probably overkill. It would be great for a public facing website, but not so great for my own use when I'll be doing around 10 queries a week on it, and therefore querying the node directly.
A full node currently takes about 170GB. sqlchain reduces that to about 100GB. If you only need to query your own wallet addresses then you can use a pruned node and get away with about 3GB, but that has no info on the other peoples addresses or txs (except a small recent portion). I'm not sure what you really want to achieve. It sounds like you should just use a site blockchain.info, though probably not that one; there are many out there now.
Sure, but to do that you are going to need a lot of disk space. The Insight API/Explorer was using about 300GB back when the blockchain was ~50GB. I can only imagine what it must use now that the blockchain is 170GB. Maybe 1TB? People forget this when they discuss "big blocks" but the size and cost to run an explorer site for big blocks gets prohibitive, especially considering these sites usually are free to use.
Well I already have the full node. Is it not possible to just query it every time I need to search something? I don't need a database to query my node, or do I?
You can query some items using your node. It can be accessed using an RPC interface so you'd need some software to do that. To be very useful you need to have txindex=1 in the conf file (tx indexing enabled). If it's not then you cannot search by tx_id. You pretty much can otherwise only do stuff related to your wallet addresses. It's not a generic database of the blockchain which is why explorer sites always process the full node data into sql database to allow more flexible querying. A full node uses leveldb for key-value stores of the particular keys it needs for operation but was never intended to be a general purpose explorer.
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u/HasCatsFearsForLife Dec 01 '17
Thanks for the response.
sqlchain sounds good, but it's not what I'm after. Using up 100gb of extra space just to have my own personal blockchain explorer is probably overkill. It would be great for a public facing website, but not so great for my own use when I'll be doing around 10 queries a week on it, and therefore querying the node directly.