You see all these analytical posts, want to start creating something similar, but have no idea where to start? Now you can!

Problem

Steemit has really a great infrastructure — many various developers are working on great projects, some of them extending features of Steemit (like steemstats.com or Vessel by Hive account@jesta), some creating something absolutely new (like utopian.io by Hive account@elear), some helping users and giving answers to their questions (like steemwhales.com by Hive account@heimindanger).

And it also has many great projects for developers (e.g. SteemSQL by Hive account@arcange, Piston by Hive account@xeroc, or SteemJS by Hive account@fabien). The problem is that all these projects are not tolerant of non-tech people. For example, what if you just want to get info about the most upvoted posts in the past month? While I was writing my first Steemit post, I looked at all available tools and now can allocate several options:

Writing a crawler

It is very inefficient. And what if you want to get info about the most upvoted posts in January 2017? I just want to note that in this case, you will need to crawl more than 3.5M posts (more precisely, 3,561,711).

Piston/SteemJS/steem-python

It is great if you want to do a complex analysis of absolutely all Steemit data. But again, it is very inefficient in other cases — you will need to get data block-by-block, meaning that in order to create a list of the most upvoted posts in January 2017, you will need to get all blocks from today.

SteemData

MySQL right now is not available, API is not very flexible (but I think that in several cases it will be the best solution). MongoDB is NoSQL, meaning that Mongo has its own system of queries and does not support SQL. I personally do not have any experience with Mongo or any other NoSQL databases, so in my case, this is not the best solution. I believe that for the most non-tech users it is also not the best solution because SQL has many various guides and tutorials (I guess it is about dozens of thousands) while Mongo has significantly less popularity (this is logical because SQL is the standard and it is used by many databases). But if you have any experience with Mongo, then it will be a great solution.

SteemSQL

I personally believe that this is the best solution for the most analysis. At least in theory. In practice, it also can raise some problems. For example, it requires drivers for SQL Server, but installing these drivers from Linux or Mac is a real adventure; Microsoft even does not have any notes that they have these drivers for Ubuntu 14.04 and 17.04 (moreover, all answers on askubuntu, serverfault, stackoverflow, and on any other similar projects say that Microsoft has drivers only for Ubuntu 15/16).

But the biggest problem for non-tech users is that SteemSQL has only two options for use: programming languages and Excel. You cannot just read a quick tutorial about SQL, start experimenting while you are learning, and get the first results in less than an hour. Also, Steemit has many mobile-only users who cannot use any of these tools even in theory.

Solution

So I decided to create a solution — SteemSQL Wrapper

It allows use SteemSQL right in your browser without any dependencies. It even allows using the several most popular queries with one click! It means that non-tech users no longer need to install any drivers/Excel and learn programming languages. They can just go to SteemSQL Wrapper and write any SQL queries to get results right in their browser. It also has the link to the SQL Tutorial for users who do not know SQL.

But it is not everything. The important part of the project is the possibility to get results even without knowledge of SQL — I prepared the several most popular queries and anyone can use them with one click. These queries include:

• Тоp 30 posts by number of upvotes
• Top 30 posts by number of comments
• Top 30 posts by pending payout
• Daily number of posts
• Daily number of new accounts
• Daily number of votes
• Top 50 utopian contributors by pending payout

I will extend this list in the near future and if you want to add any specific query then just write me.

Future features

In fact, they depend on your feedback. But right now I have plans for the next features:

• Easy sharing of queries between users
• API that will allow developers to send a simple GET request with their SQL and get JSON with all data
• A simple interface which will show all tables/columns from the database
• Autocomplete
• History of your queries
• Analysis of received data (sort and calculate averages/medians/sums of columns)
• Ability to create custom graphs from data

For Moderators

My commits:

• Init
• Add README.md

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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