While building your Steem blockchain dApp, you will soon realize that it’s not that easy to get the data you are looking for quickly, unless there’s already an API that gives you what you need.

We have several reliable, general purpose, “full” API nodes, provided by Steemit Inc. and community members:

You can use them for development or even (if you are brave enough) for production.
If your dApp is small and simple, it might work. And yes, in many cases it will.
But is it optimal? No.

In previous episodes, I described different types of nodes and their names and how this can be misleading when it comes to the so-called “full” nodes.

TL;DR
A full node means here something different than in the Bitcoin realm, where Bitcoin full node is pretty much something that a Steem consensus node can do.
Here, on Steem, the word “full” doesn’t refer to anything related to the blockchain - it refers to the fully featured set of APIs enabled within steemd.

Do you really need a full set of API calls?
In most cases you don’t. To get an idea about the information you can get from common Steem APIs, take a look at the devportal:

https://developers.steem.io/apidefinitions/

^{By the way, please consider voting for Steem.DAO @inertia’s proposal, who already greatly contributed to the Dev Portal Documentation and is eager to do more.}

For example, if you need the information returned by get_market_history, take a look at condenser_api.get_market_history and at its underlying api, in which case you will find:

Also see: market_history_api.get_market_history
Which means that the API node you need should be running a market_history plugin.

Another example is a situation in which you want to find who “Resteemed” (a.k.a. “Reblogged”) a given post.
Here, you are lucky, because there’s a method for that called get_reblogged_by and provided by the plugin follow.

Maybe you want to get tags used by a specific author? That’s easy too, there’s the get_tags_used_by_author method provided by - yes, you guessed correctly - tags plugin.

There’s a pretty big chance that if your app needs to use get_market_history, it doesn’t need tags or follow plugins, because it’s not blogging oriented, and vice-versa - if you deal with tags and follow, you probably don’t care about the internal market.

Such knowledge lets you optimize the API infrastructure needed for your dApp.
For instance, you can run a “fat node” without market_history, account_history(see Steem Pressure #6) and use hivemind to get the tags and follow features.

That’s not the end yet. You get a lot more data than you’ve asked for, but still that may not be what you need.

Do you know why? If not, then please, read the first paragraph again.

How many blocks has the witness gtg missed so far?
That’s easy.
Run:

curl -s --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0", "method":"database_api.find_witnesses", "params": {"owners":["gtg"]}, "id":1}' https://api.steem.house

You will instantly get your answer, because the find_witnesses method returns this information… among many pieces of information that you don’t need.

Now, try something more complicated:

Problem to solve

How many blocks did @gtg produce until block 40000000?
And how many blocks did @gtg produce in August 2017?
And how many blocks did he produce that contained more than 50 transactions?
And what percentage of blocks produced in 2018 had more non-virtual operations than transactions?
How many blocks had only one transaction and which of them had the highest number of non-virtual operations? What is the id of the transaction that contains them?

You should be able to answer all these questions, all the data are in the blockchain after all. The problem is that steemd has no suitable API to answer these questions quickly.
This means that you either have access to a third party service / API that can answer these questions (see @arcange’s SteemSQL “SQL server database with all Steemit blockchain data”, which is available in subscription model), or look into blocks to find your answer.

In the latter case, you will have to inspect all the blocks ever produced using the get_block method.
The good news is that every consensus node can run the block_api plugin.
The Steem blockchain has recently passed the 40 million blocks mark.
This means that in order to answer the first question, you will need to send more than 40 million requests to the API endpoint.
Each time this type of question is asked you will need to repeat the procedure, unless you…

Build and run your own custom Steem API