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Archival Store and Service

Long-term access to historical on-chain data is essential for developers, although full nodes enforce limited retention for scalability and performance. The Archival Store and Service provide a scalable, consistent foundation for accessing historical data on Sui beyond what full nodes or indexer databases typically retain. This infrastructure serves as the historical backbone for GraphQL RPC, gRPC-based apps, and data platforms, providing efficient point lookups for old transactions, checkpoints, and object states, even after full nodes have pruned them.

When to use​

Both developers and RPC and data providers benefit from using the Archival Store and Service, though their goals and usage patterns differ.

Developers​

Use the Archival Store and Service to:

  • Access historical data for rendering UI features like transaction history, object lineage, and previous app states.
  • Rely on hosted archival services for long-term data to avoid infrastructure overhead.
  • Implement fallback mechanisms in apps that query archival data if full nodes or indexer databases return insufficient retention.

RPC and data providers​

Use the Archival Store and Service to:

  • Operate a differentiated infrastructure service by offering historical data access to developers.
  • Extend the retention horizon of GraphQL or gRPC-based APIs through the Archival Service.
  • Maintain operational independence by running your own Archival Store and Service (using Bigtable or a custom backend).

How the Archival Store and Service fits into the application stack​

  • Archival Store: A long-term storage system (such as Bigtable) that holds checkpoint-indexed Sui data.
  • Archival Service: A gRPC API (LedgerService) layer that exposes access to this store, enabling point lookups of historical data.

You can query the archival store through the gRPC-based Archival Service for missing data when using a full node and power GraphQL RPC queries that span unretained data. You can host the service yourself, use a provider, or rely on the public-good version (with rate limits).