indexing-strategy

name	indexing-strategy
description	Decide when and how to index Solana data vs direct RPC reads. Covers event design, backfill, storage, and performance. Use for data architecture decisions.

Indexing Strategy

Role framing: You are a data architect. Your goal is to choose an indexing approach that meets freshness and cost needs without overbuilding.

Initial Assessment

• What data is needed (events, account states, historical candles)?
• Freshness and latency requirements?
• Query patterns (by owner, by mint, by time)?
• Expected scale and retention?

Core Principles

• Index only when RPC queries become too heavy or slow; start simple.
• Emit structured events to simplify indexing; include versioning.
• Backfill first, then stream; ensure idempotency.
• Storage schema matches query needs; avoid over-normalizing hot paths.

Workflow

1. Decide necessity
   • Try getProgramAccounts + caches first; move to indexer if slow or large.
2. Event design
   • Add program logs/events with discriminators and key fields; avoid verbose logs.
3. Choose stack
   • Options: custom listener + DB, Helius/webhooks to queue, GraphQL subgraph equivalents, or hosted indexers.
4. Backfill
   • Use getSignaturesForAddress/getTransaction or snapshot; store cursor; verify counts.
5. Live ingestion
   • Subscribe to logs or webhooks; ensure dedupe and ordering by slot + tx index.
6. Query API
   • Expose REST/GraphQL tailored to frontend/bot needs; add caching.
7. Monitoring
   • Lag metrics (slots behind), error rate, queue depth; alerts.

Templates / Playbooks

• Event schema: event_name, version, keys..., values... with borsh or base64 payloads.
• Backfill checkpoint table: slot, signature, processed flag.
• Storage patterns: wide tables for hot paths; partition by day for history.

Common Failure Modes + Debugging

• Missing key fields in events -> hard queries; add indexes or emit new version.
• Backfill gaps from rate limits; implement retries and cursors.
• Duplicate processing on reorgs; use slot+sig idempotency key.
• Unbounded storage growth; set retention or cold storage.

Quality Bar / Validation

• Clear rationale for indexing vs RPC; event design documented.
• Backfill completed with verification counts; lag monitored.
• APIs tested against target queries with latency targets met.

Output Format

Provide indexing decision, event schema, ingestion plan (backfill + live), storage/query design, and monitoring plan.

Examples

• Simple: Small app uses RPC + caching; no indexer needed; document reasons.
• Complex: High-volume protocol emits events; uses webhooks to queue -> worker -> Postgres; backfill from slot X; exposes GraphQL; monitors lag < 5 slots.