You have to understand some nuances of the technology to be able to fully appreciate the emptiness of the claim made by BurstIQ to have a “blockchain-enabled big data” system.
Based on the tech, this claim just makes no sense, and it doesn’t surprise me that all of their job ads are for normal sql skills. Trying to query a blockchain you are trying to reconstruct the state of an event-sourced system by replaying all the events (ie without using CQRS). It is incredibly painful to answer even basic questions, so anyone with an analytic question to answer ends up building/using an indexer and writing the results to a sql database so they can actually use the data is a flexible way (ie they use CQRS effectively). Source: I recently wrote a blockchain indexer to answer queries because I couldn’t do what I wanted directly by querying the chain even though all the data is there. It walks a chain using RPC queries and writes the results to a postgres database.
In and of itself this doesn’t invalidate the potential niche usefulness of a blockchain btw (say you need to share data between parties who don’t trust each other without having a central party because noone would trust that party) but the blockchain doesn’t in any sense enable the “big data”, in actual fact you are managing to achieve data analysis in spite of the blockchain.
Also, it’s 2022, can we just let the term “big data” have a decent burial at this point?
Based on the tech, this claim just makes no sense, and it doesn’t surprise me that all of their job ads are for normal sql skills. Trying to query a blockchain you are trying to reconstruct the state of an event-sourced system by replaying all the events (ie without using CQRS). It is incredibly painful to answer even basic questions, so anyone with an analytic question to answer ends up building/using an indexer and writing the results to a sql database so they can actually use the data is a flexible way (ie they use CQRS effectively). Source: I recently wrote a blockchain indexer to answer queries because I couldn’t do what I wanted directly by querying the chain even though all the data is there. It walks a chain using RPC queries and writes the results to a postgres database.
In and of itself this doesn’t invalidate the potential niche usefulness of a blockchain btw (say you need to share data between parties who don’t trust each other without having a central party because noone would trust that party) but the blockchain doesn’t in any sense enable the “big data”, in actual fact you are managing to achieve data analysis in spite of the blockchain.
Also, it’s 2022, can we just let the term “big data” have a decent burial at this point?