I Queried a Blockchain Like a Database and It Kind of Broke My Brain

Week 2 of #100DaysOfSolana: on reading public data, comparing accounts to tables, and the moment the "everything is public" thing got real.

Let me tell you about the exact moment week 2 of this challenge stopped feeling theoretical.

I had just written my first getBalance() call. Simple stuff paste an address, get a number back. And then I thought: what if I paste someone else's address?

So I did. I pasted the Token-2022 program address (TokenzQdBNbLqP5VEhdkAS6EPFLC1PHnBqCXEpPxuEb) into my script. Same code, different address. And it just... worked. No API key. No authentication. No 403 Forbidden. Full balance, full transaction history, returned immediately.

That's when the "Solana is a public database" framing stopped being a metaphor and started being a fact I could feel.

What I Actually Built This Week

Week 2 was the Reading the Blockchain arc. Seven days of querying data, building UIs around it, and then staring at the account model until it made sense.

Days 8–9: Reading balances and transaction history

The RPC pattern is genuinely familiar if you've worked with any REST API:

const rpc = createSolanaRpc(devnet("https://api.devnet.solana.com"));

const { value: balance } = await rpc.getBalance(targetAddress).send();

That's it. That's the whole thing. getBalance returns lamports, you divide by 1_000_000_000, you're done. getSignaturesForAddress is just as clean, you get back a list of transaction signatures with slots, timestamps, and status. Felt immediately comfortable coming from a REST background.

Day 10: Moving it to the browser

Same SDK, same calls, just inside a Vite project instead of a Node script. The @solana/kit package bundles fine for the browser, Vite handles it. The interesting part was error handling in a terminal script you can let an error crash and read the stack trace. In a web app, you're catching bad addresses and network failures and actually telling the user something useful.

Day 11: Accounts vs. databases: the comparison that changed how I think

This was the one that took the longest to sit with. I built a comparison table. Here's the short version of what surprised me most:

That last one genuinely surprised me. When I ran solana account TokenkegQfeZyiNwAJbNbGKPFXCWuBvf9Ss623VQ5DA and saw executable: true and a BPF Loader as the owner, I had to sit with it for a minute. The thing that runs your code and the thing that stores your data are the same kind of object, just with different contents.

Days 12: Devnet vs. mainnet

Two RPC connections, one URL difference:

const devnetRpc = createSolanaRpc(devnet("https://api.devnet.solana.com"));

const mainnetRpc = createSolanaRpc(mainnet("https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com"));

Same queries, completely different data. Different balances, different transaction histories, different activity. It's what I'd expect from staging vs. production databases : same schema, separate state — except here "staging" is a whole separate validator network, not a different database on the same server. And the type system in @solana/kit enforces this: you can't accidentally pass a devnet RPC where a mainnet one is expected. That's actually a nice developer ergonomics detail.

The Thing That Still Feels Weird

There are no JOINs. There's no server-side filtering.

In a traditional database, I write a query, the server processes it, and I get back exactly the rows I asked for. On Solana, programs receive accounts as inputs to instructions. If I want to filter or combine data, I do that off-chain via RPC and assemble results myself.

Coming from SQL, this feels backwards. But I think I'm starting to understand why it has to be this way: when thousands of validators are independently processing transactions, you can't have them running arbitrary compute-heavy queries. You need deterministic, bounded operations. The query layer is the developer's problem. The blockchain's job is to execute and record.

It's a constraint that's also the entire point.

What's Next

Week 3 is transactions actually writing state changes instead of reading them. I've been querying this global database for a week. Now I get to write to it.

If you're doing #100DaysOfSolana: what was the hardest mental model shift in week 2 for you? For me it was definitely the rent model: the idea that storage cost is attached to the record itself, not abstracted into infrastructure pricing. Still wrapping my head around the implications.

Week 2 of my #100DaysOfSolana journey. Building in public, one day at a time.

#100daysofsolana #solana #web3 #blockchain