Community Data

The Spice.ai Cloud Platform includes a comprehensive set of free, ready-to-query sample and blockchain datasets.

The Spice runtime can query these datasets using the Spice.ai Data Connector.

Quickstart

To access these community datasets, navigate to spice.ai, and create a new account by clicking Try for Free.

After logging in, create an app in order to get an API key.

This quickstart will use the eth.recent_blocks dataset.

Step 1. Initialize a new project:

# Initialize a new Spice app
spice init spice_app

# Change to app directory
cd spice_app

Step 2. Log in to the Spice Cloud Platform from the command line using the spice login command. A pop up browser window will prompt you to authenticate:

spice login

Logging in will create or update a .env file in the project directory with the API key.

Step 3. Start the runtime:

# Start the runtime
spice run

Step 4. Configure the dataset:

In a new terminal window, configure a new dataset using the spice dataset configure command:

spice dataset configure

Enter a dataset name that will be used to reference the dataset in queries. This name does not need to match the name in the dataset source.

dataset name: (spice_app) eth_recent_blocks

Enter the description of the dataset:

description: Recent Ethereum blocks

Enter the location of the dataset:

from: spice.ai/eth.recent_blocks

Select y when prompted whether to accelerate the data:

Locally accelerate (y/n)? y

You should see the following output from your runtime terminal:

2024-08-05T13:09:08.342450Z  INFO runtime: Dataset eth_recent_blocks registered (spice.ai/eth.recent_blocks), acceleration (arrow, 10s refresh), results cache enabled.
2024-08-05T13:09:08.343641Z  INFO runtime::accelerated_table::refresh_task: Loading data for dataset eth_recent_blocks
2024-08-05T13:09:09.575822Z  INFO runtime::accelerated_table::refresh_task: Loaded 146 rows (6.36 MiB) for dataset eth_recent_blocks in 1s 232ms.

Step 5. In a new terminal window, use the Spice SQL REPL to query the dataset

spice sql

SELECT number, size, gas_used from eth_recent_blocks LIMIT 10;

The output displays the results of the query along with the query execution time:

+----------+--------+----------+
| number   | size   | gas_used |
+----------+--------+----------+
| 20462425 | 32466  | 6705045  |
| 20462435 | 262114 | 29985196 |
| 20462427 | 138376 | 29989452 |
| 20462444 | 40541  | 9480363  |
| 20462431 | 78505  | 16994166 |
| 20462461 | 110372 | 21987571 |
| 20462441 | 51089  | 11136440 |
| 20462428 | 327660 | 29998593 |
| 20462429 | 133518 | 20159194 |
| 20462422 | 61461  | 13389415 |
+----------+--------+----------+

Time: 0.008562625 seconds. 10 rows.

You can experiment with the time it takes to generate queries when using non-accelerated datasets. You can change the acceleration setting from true to false in the datasets.yaml file.

Additional Example

# Query to display the average gas used in recent Ethereum blocks
SELECT AVG(gas_used) FROM eth_recent_blocks;

The output displays the average gas used:

+------------------+
| avg              |
+------------------+
| 15000000.1234567 |
+------------------+

Time: 0.005678123 seconds. 1 row.