Definition

Substreams introduce a few new concepts to The Graph ecosystem, inspired by traditional large-scale data systems, fused with the novelties of blockchain.
Substreams is:
A streaming-first system
Based on gRPC and protobuf
Based on the StreamingFast Firehose
A remote code execution framework, that is:
highly cacheable
highly parallelizable
Composable down to individual modules, and allows a community to build higher-order modules with great ease
Deterministic, as it feeds from deterministic blockchain data
Substreams is not:
A relational database
A REST service
Concerned directly with how the data is stored
A general-purpose non-deterministic event stream processor
The word Substreams refers to:
A plurality of streams, each in the form of a module.
Packed in a single package, but streamable individually (a subunit of a package)
Streams composed from imported modules, blended, enriched or refined together (as in sub or downstream component).
A wink to Subgraphs
A manifest or package will usually contain more than one module, and/or import one or more modules. It is therefore fitting to talk about a package being a Substreams package.
The Substreams engine is completely agnostic of the underlying blockchain protocol, and works solely on data extracted from nodes using the Firehose. Different protocols have different chain-specific extensions (e.g. Ethereum, which exposes eth_calls).

Substreams

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Comparison

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