The intricacies of indexing blockchain data

Written by Sean Au

Anyone can obtain data from the blockchain, but to obtain this efficiently into power decentralized applications at scale requires indexing blockchain data. But what is indexing? Imagine you are reading your favourite book and you need to find a specific piece of information. You flip to the back of the book and start searching the index which takes you straight to the page. The index of a book contains keywords organised in alphabetical order to help find information faster than trying to scan through the entire book. From a technical perspective, indexing or more specifically database indexing, works in a similar way. It is the process of enabling faster retrieval of data from a database. More specifically, it is a special data structure that allows a user, or an application to quickly access the data it needs without having to check every single record. A blockchain can be thought of as a very slow and inefficient database where data is stored in groups or blocks. For example, imag…