Access Alchemy Data from MySQL in PHP

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Connect to Alchemy through the standard MySQL libraries in PHP.

You can use the CData SQL Gateway and ODBC Driver for Alchemy to access Alchemy data from MySQL clients, without needing to perform an ETL or cache data. Follow the steps below to connect to Alchemy data in real time through PHP's standard MySQL interfaces, mysqli and PDO_MySQL.

Connect to Alchemy Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Alchemy Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Alchemy.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Alchemy (see below).

Alchemy API Profile Settings

Alchemy uses API key authentication. The API key is supplied in the request URL path. To obtain an API key:

  1. Sign in to your Alchemy account at https://dashboard.alchemy.com.
  2. Open an existing app or create a new one.
  3. Copy the app's API key from the API Key dialog.

After obtaining your API key, set the following connection properties:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • Network: Optional. The blockchain network slug for NFT API requests (for example, eth-mainnet, base-mainnet, polygon-mainnet). Defaults to eth-mainnet.

Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

  • APIKey: Set this to your Alchemy app API key.

Configure the SQL Gateway

See the SQL Gateway Overview to set up connectivity to Alchemy data as a virtual MySQL database. You will configure a MySQL remoting service that listens for MySQL requests from clients. The service can be configured in the SQL Gateway UI.

Creating a MySQL Remoting Service in SQL Gateway (Salesforce is shown)

Connect in PHP

The following examples show how to use object-oriented interfaces to connect and execute queries. Initialize the connection object with the following parameters to connect to the virtual MySQL database:

  • Host: Specify the remote host location where the service is running. In this case "localhost" is used for the remote host setting since the service is running on the local machine.
  • Username: Specify the username for a user you authorized on the SQL Gateway's Users tab.
  • Password: Specify the password for the authorized user account.
  • Database Name: Specify the system DSN as the database name.
  • Port: Specify the port the service is running on; port 3306 in this example.

mysqli

<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "password", "CData API Sys","3306");
?>

PDO

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=CData API Sys;port=3306', 'user', 'password');
?>

Query in PHP

With the connection established, you can then access tables. The following steps walk through the example:

  1. Query the table; for example, ContractsForOwner. The results will be stored as an associative array in the $result object.
  2. Iterate over each row and column, printing the values to display in the PHP page.
  3. Close the connection.

mysqli

$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT Address, Name FROM ContractsForOwner WHERE Owner = '0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045'");
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
  foreach ($row as $k=>$v) {
    echo "$k : $v";
    echo "<br>"; 
  }
}
$mysqli->close();

PDO

$result = $pdo->query("SELECT Address, Name FROM ContractsForOwner WHERE Owner = '0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045'");
while($row = $result->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
  foreach ($row as $k=>$v) {
    echo "$k : $v";
    echo "<br>"; 
  }
}
$result = null;
$pdo = null;

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Alchemy with the API Driver

Connect to Alchemy