At Personal the Second, our mission is to drive the subsequent technology of sports activities fandom – NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of professional athletes. Participant NFTs are way more than the equal of digital baseball playing cards, they’re the way forward for the sports activities collectibles market.
We’re serving to to prepared the ground. Followers and traders can observe real-time market values for NFL and NBA participant NFTs by way of our service. We additionally present an on-line market for purchasing and promoting NFTs. Consider us like Ameritrade or Coinbase, however in your sports activities NFT property.
Most significantly, we now have additionally created a fantasy sports activities platform known as The House owners Membership that debuted with a fantasy soccer league for the 2021-22 season. We gave out $1.5 million in prizes to opponents based mostly on their NFL fantasy groups, composed of the participant NFTs they owned.
Whereas proudly owning different kinds of NFTs has turn into like amassing artwork, we’re gamifying sports activities NFTs to be able to create much more utility and pleasure round them. This additionally creates larger alternatives for savvy merchants to earn a living shopping for and promoting participant NFTs.
This makes my job as CTO of a small startup extraordinarily attention-grabbing, as I needed to oversee constructing an information infrastructure that supported:
- A fantasy sports activities league the place each knowledge ingestion and concurrent utilization spikes throughout sport days
- A participant leaderboard with real-time outcomes
- Safe, environment friendly and quick knowledge trade with the Ethereum blockchain the place participant NFT knowledge is saved
- Extra typical use instances reminiscent of inside monetary reporting
It’s a tall order. Contemplating how rapidly the Internet 3.0 house has been evolving, it’s no shock that the primary model of our knowledge infrastructure didn’t help all of those calls for. Luckily, we had been in a position to rapidly pivot after we found a real-time analytics database tailored for our quick evolving wants.
DynamoDB: Analytics Limitations Revealed
I joined Personal The Second in 2021 whereas we had been nonetheless in stealth mode. I rapidly found that to construct our fantasy sports activities league and NFT market, we would want two essential sources of knowledge:
- Actual-time sport scores and participant statistics, each provided by an exterior knowledge supplier
- Blockchain nodes reminiscent of Alchemy that permit us to each learn and write details about NFTs and customers’ crypto wallets to the blockchain
I constructed the primary model of our knowledge infrastructure wholly round Amazon’s DynamoDB database within the cloud. As our database of file, DynamoDB was nice at ingesting exterior knowledge, which we saved inside a single desk in DynamoDB. We additionally had smaller DynamoDB tables storing our person data and the mechanics of our fantasy sports activities contests. Moreover our common weekly prime staff contests and cumulative participant leaderboards, we ran contests reminiscent of worst staff, in order that customers with dangerous NFT playing cards nonetheless had an opportunity to win.
To run these contests, we wanted to run complicated, large-scale queries utilizing the DynamoDB knowledge tables. And due to the variety of contests, we had a whole lot of completely different queries. That’s the place DynamoDB’s analytical limitations reared their ugly heads.
For example, to make any DynamoDB question run fairly quick, we first wanted to create a secondary index with a form key tailor-made for that question. Additionally, DynamoDB, as a NoSQL database, doesn’t help SQL instructions reminiscent of JOINING a number of tables. As a substitute, we needed to denormalize our essential DynamoDB desk by importing the entire person data that was saved in separate DynamoDB tables. This had main downsides, reminiscent of difficulties holding knowledge precisely up to date throughout sport days, as effectively needing further storage for a lot redundant knowledge in our essential desk. It’s all deeply-technical work that requires a developer expert in DynamoDB analytics. And they’re a uncommon and costly bunch.
Thrown into the combination was the object-relational mapping (ORM) instrument we had deployed known as Dynamoose. Dynamoose gives helpful options together with a programmatic API and a schema for the schemaless DynamoDB. Nevertheless, the tradeoff for that further knowledge modeling is a whole lot of further latency for our queries. In our case, that resulted in a question latency of three seconds.
All in all, attempting to make DynamoDB help quick analytics was a nightmare that may not finish. And with the NFL season set to start out in lower than a month, we had been in a bind.
A Sooner, Friendlier Answer
We thought of a number of alternate options. One was to create one other knowledge pipeline that may mixture knowledge because it was ingested into DynamoDB. This is able to require creating a brand new desk, which might’ve required a number of further weeks of dev time. One other was to scrap DynamoDB and discover a conventional SQL database. Each would have required a whole lot of work.
After discovering Rockset by way of an AWS weblog on creating leaderboards, we wasted no time in beginning to construct a brand new customer-facing leaderboard based mostly on Rockset. One of many first issues my staff and I seen was how straightforward Rockset was to make use of. I’ve labored with virtually each database on the market up to now twelve years. Rockset’s UI is actually the perfect I’ve labored with.
The SQL question editor is top-notch, monitoring question historical past, saving queries and extra. It made my six builders, who all know SQL, instantly productive. Simply based mostly on skimming the SELECTs and JOINs in a number of pattern Question Lambdas, they understood what sort of knowledge they’d and how one can work with it. By the top of the day, they’d actually constructed functioning SQL queries and APIs with none exterior assist. And with Rockset’s Converged Index™ and computerized question optimizer, all queries are quick and failure proof. We don’t must construct a customized index for each question like we do with Dynamo.
Through the use of Rockset, we saved weeks of man-hours attempting to beat and compensate for DynamoDB’s analytical limitations. We had been in a position to roll out a complete new participant leaderboard in simply three weeks.
Developer productiveness is nice, however what about question efficiency? That’s the place Rockset actually shined. As soon as we moved the entire queries feeding our leaderboards to Rockset – 100 Question Lambdas in complete – we began with the ability to question our knowledge in 100 milliseconds or much less. That’s at the least a 30x velocity improve over DynamoDB.
Rockset’s serverless mannequin additionally made scalability very easy. This was necessary to optimize each efficiency in addition to worth, since our utilization is so dynamic. In the course of the first season, our peak concurrent utilization throughout sport instances – Monday and Thursday nights, and all day Sundays – was 20x greater than throughout off peak instances. I’d merely flip a swap and bump up the dimensions of our Rockset occasion throughout sport days and never fear about any bottlenecks or time outs.
We gained a lot confidence in Rockset’s velocity, scalability, and ease of use that we rapidly moved the remainder of our analytical operations to Rockset. That features ten knowledge collections in all, the biggest of which holds 15 million information, that retailer key knowledge, together with:
- 65,000 NFT transactions price $1 million in our first season
- the 23,000 present customers in our system together with information of the 160,000 NFTs they personal
- our largest knowledge assortment – 400,000 information ingested from blockchains for NFT transactions associated to our sensible contracts
DynamoDB stays our database of file, connecting to microservices syncing with the blockchain and streaming knowledge feeds. However actually each knowledge retrieval and analytical calculation now goes by way of Rockset, from loading the participant NFT market and viewing the entire pricing statistics and transactions, to the person playing cards. Rockset syncs with DynamoDB always, pulling new sport scores each 5-10 seconds and syncing with the blockchain the place NFT and person pockets knowledge is saved, and writing all of that into an listed assortment.
We additionally do all of our inside administrative reporting by way of Rockset. Rockset JOINs market, person, and funds data from separate DynamoDB tables to supply mixture stories that we export as CSV recordsdata. We had been in a position to produce these stories in mere minutes utilizing the Collections tab in Rockset.
Constructing this in DynamoDB, in contrast, would have required scripts and guide becoming a member of of information, each of that are fairly error-prone. We in all probability saved days if not weeks of time utilizing Rockset. It additionally enabled us to run giveaways and contests for customers who had full set collections of NFTs in our system or spent X {dollars} within the market. With out Rockset, aggregating our ever-expanding assortment of DynamoDB tables would have required an excessive amount of work.
Future Plans
Final season we gave out $1.5 million in prizes. That was actual cash that was on the road! Nonetheless, it was basically a proof of idea for our Rockset-based analytics platform, which carried out flawlessly. We’ve minimize the variety of question errors and timed-out queries to zero. Each question runs quick out of the field. Our common question latency has shrunk from six seconds to 300 milliseconds. And that’s true for small datasets and bigger ones.
Furthermore, Rockset makes my builders tremendous productive, with the easy-to-use UI and Write API and SQL help. And options like Converged Index and question optimization remove the necessity to spend worthwhile engineering time on question efficiency.
For the approaching NFL season, we’re speaking to numerous potential massive title companions within the sports activities media and fantasy enterprise. They’re coming to us as a result of we’re the one platform I do know of at present that integrates the blockchain on prime of a utility-based NFT resolution.
We’re additionally engaged on a whole lot of backend adjustments reminiscent of constructing new APIs in Rockset and new integrations. We’re additionally making ready for 10x development on each dimension – person base, participant NFTs, knowledge information and extra. What gained’t change is Rockset. It’s confirmed to us that it could deal with all of our wants: ultra-fast, scalable and sophisticated analytics which might be straightforward to develop and cost-effective to handle.
