Spice.ai OSS and the Spice.ai Cloud Platform

You can use any number of predefined datasets available from the Spice.ai Cloud Platform in the Spice runtime.

A list of publically available datasets from Spice.ai can be found here: https://docs.spice.ai/building-blocks/datasets.

In order to access public datasets from Spice, you will first need to create an account with Spice.ai by selecting the free tier membership.

Navigate to spice.ai and create a new account by clicking on Try for Free.

After creating an account, you will need to create an app in order to create to an API key.

You will now be able to access datasets from the Spice.ai Platform. For this quickstart, we will be using the eth.recent_blocks dataset.

Step 1. Log in and authenticate from the command line using the spice login command. A pop up browser window will prompt you to authenticate:

spice login

Step 2. Initialize a new project and start the runtime:

# Initialize a new Spice app
spice init spice_app

# Change to app directory
cd spice_app

# Start the runtime
spice run

Step 3. 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:

2024-02-21T22:49:10.038461Z  INFO runtime: Loaded dataset: eth_recent_blocks

Step 4. 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 |
+----------+--------+----------+
| 19281345 | 400378 | 16150051 |
| 19281344 | 200501 | 16480224 |
| 19281343 | 97758  | 12605531 |
| 19281342 | 89629  | 12035385 |
| 19281341 | 133649 | 13335719 |
| 19281340 | 307584 | 18389159 |
| 19281339 | 89233  | 13391332 |
| 19281338 | 75250  | 12806684 |
| 19281337 | 100721 | 11823522 |
| 19281336 | 150137 | 13418403 |
+----------+--------+----------+

Query took: 0.004057791 seconds

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.