Getting started

Getting Started is the place to get oriented and learn how to use TONalytica!

TONalytica is made for technical and non-technical users alike.

Whether you are a seasoned SQL developer, blockchain researcher, business analyst, or none of the above - you can use TONalytica to start analyzing TON Blockchain data in an instant.

With the help of our community, we've created a lot of helpful guides and tools to aid you in your journey of becoming a full-fledged TONalytica Creator.

The absolute quickest way to get started with TONalytica is to follow along with our Getting Started Video Series here and to check out our Getting Started Dashboard here.

The next steps to dive deeper depend on whether you:

1. Already know SQL

2. Are more of a just-in-case or just-in-time learner.

Just-in-Case

Just-in-Case learning is school-style - read and watch a lot of content upfront to get a general understanding, then start experimenting with doing.

If this is your preferred learning style, our long-form TONalytica Guides go a lot deeper than our videos while still guiding you through simple projects to give you a general understanding of how to create with TONalytica.

Just-in-Time

Just-in-Time learning is for those who learn by doing. If you already have an idea of what you want to do with TONalytica and just need to unblock yourself by finding some specific tactical knowledge, Core Features likely contains the information you need.

Tables and Snippets are more advanced features worth experimenting with once you've understood the basics.

Don't know SQL?

If you're not very familiar with SQL, start by exploring our SQL Guides here.

How to Use SQL

A fundamental understanding of SQL is needed to be able to successfully query for data on TONalytica.

SQL is widely used in the Software Development industry and you can find a lot of non-TONalytica-specific documentation about it. This often times helps with answering Query-related questions since most answers can easily be found on the internet.

By default, this documentation shows information for our TONalytica V1 Engine, which runs on a PostgreSQL database. Our new data platform, TONalytica Engine V2 is currently in beta with a Trino query engine. It offers exciting features like better scaling, cross-chain Queries, and Snippets. TONalytica Engine V2 will become the default over the next few months, so we recommend you try it out!

Basic SQL

If you're not very familiar with SQL in general, we recommend starting with our SQL Guides

PostgreSQL

The official PostgreSQL documentation is great. TONalytica runs on PostgreSQL 12.2.

Trino

The official ANSI SQL documentation is super helpful.

How to parse TON Virtual Machine Data

The data you will find on the chain and in TONalytica's database is almost all pulled from TON Virtual Machine based environments.

Thus, understanding how the TON Virtual Machine and smart contracts work as a whole is an important foundation for being able to find, understand, and use much of the data available in TONalytica.

If you are able to read most of the data in Tonscan or TONAPI, you're already well on your way to being able to create insightful Queries and Visualizations with TONalytica.

Unfortunately, we haven't yet found one great resource we can point you to currently as each smart contract has its own rules.

What communities, protocols, and businesses care about

This is something that might come as a surprise to you but a key component of being an effective data-analyzing Creator is understanding how to separate "signal from noise."

Some data is interesting and valuable, some data isn't. Knowing how to surface the interesting bits by making them clear and easy to understand is a fundamental part of becoming a great data-analyzing Creator.

Ask yourself:

What Data is interesting and needed for my audience/community/project/company to make better decisions?

There are thousands of ways to go about finding metrics that are interesting, though talking with the community or founders is usually the best starting place.

Invite Colleagues

TONalytica is better together.

Admins, to start enjoying the collaborative nature of TONalytica you’ll want to invite your team!

Users can view team member’s queries for inspiration (or debugging 😉), fork them to create similar queries of their own, view & create dashboards, and share insights with others via Email, Slack, Mattermost or HipChat.

Users can only be invited by admins - to invite a new user go to Settings>Users and hit New User:

Then, fill in their name and email. They’ll get an invite via email and be required to set up a TONalytica account.

To add a user to an existing group, go to Setting>Groups, select the group and add users by typing their name: