Chapter 11. Node Internals and Analytics

As blockchain technologies have continued to mature and seep further into real-world adoption, two major needs have arisen. The first is the need for interoperability and integration, whether between legacy systems and newly introduced blockchain systems or between the different flavors of blockchains that may sit within an enterprise. This need is discussed in Chapter 1. The second major need that has arisen, much to the joy (or possibly chagrin) of many data scientists and architects, is the demand for analysis of the data these blockchains accumulate. There’ll be plenty of blockchain data in the coming years to keep everyone busy.

Given the nature of how logical and physical data is stored on the blockchain, whether in key-value pairs, UTXOs,1 directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), plaintext versus ciphertext, etc., traditional analytics tools may not be readily able to read, process, and analyze blockchain data out of the box. Corda does try to make things easy by allowing data to be stored in the clear in SQL formats using QueryableStates (see Chapter 7 for details). But still, it’s entirely possible that existing tools will require a retrofit to become blockchain data-aware, and new capabilities and tools will arise that specifically help with ingesting the unique nature of blockchain data.

In this chapter, we’ll tour performing analytics on the Corda blockchain using an open source tool called PyCorda, which was created by the author of ...

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