[edgyquant]

It will never be as quick to loop through a giant blockchain to generate a dataset and then do something with it as it is to run queries in a highly optimized database that mirrors the end result of looping through that ledger. Blockchains are kind of like git and you need to move through each commit before you can get a snapshot of the current data.

[tromp]

Some blockchains are far more optimized than that. Like Mimblewimble blockchains in which all spent outputs can be permanently eliminated without hampering verifiability of the UTXO set.