I've been building an app on Steem and found the native Steem blockchain and SDK packages such as steem-js can only get you to a certain point before you encounter limitations with what you can do.

One such limitation I encountered recently was needing to query for posts by multiple tags. At some point it appears that Steem supported the ability to query by multiple tags and then deprecated it in favour of external services.

This is just one limitation I've encountered, one of the other limitations is the documentation sucks. Half of the methods in Steem JS are undocumented, deprecated or difficult to use. As a developer, I understand the importance of documentation (or the very least, tests) to understand something new.

I explored different options including Steemit Inc's official SBDS (Steem Blockchain Data Service) but it's marketed as not being ready for production use and I couldn't even get it to work. There is also an open issue since early May about master being broken, with no fix in sight.

Which is where @steemsql by @arcange comes into the frame.

For a period of time, it appears that SteemSQL was free, but understandable when you're hosting a reliable database source the size of the Steem blockchain 160gb+, the cost of providing a free service just isn't realistic.

For 10 SBD (Steem Backed Dollars) per month, you get a read-only Microsoft SQL Server database you can connect to and query. All of the Steem blockchain data is there and seems to be quite up-to-date.

It's a beautiful service provided by @arcange and 10 SBD is quite cheap for what you get. I considered building something myself, but ultimately decided it would outweigh the 10 SBD asking price if I were to build my own managed solution.

I am not aware of the limits imposed on the service, but from what I can see it's a service that is unlimited for 10 SBD and honestly, you can't even host it yourself for that price per month in storage fees, let alone bandwidth costs as well.

Based on what I could see, many are using SteemSQL to do monthly reports on earnings, curate content and create visualisations. I would love to know if any big apps are using SteemSQL as well.

I am still using Steem JS for more real-time based functionality, but for things like search, user querying and advanced post querying I am using SteemSQL.

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