Storing structured data in private blockchain

Question

The task.

Develop distributed registry on blockchain network that can store public data of the certain objects.

For example:

{
  "id": 123456789012345,
  "title": "Big black box (not more than 100 characters)",
  "description": "not more than 255 characters",
  "serial_number": "SN4567RT12",
  "type": 4,
  "size": 50,
  "date_of_manufacture": 1531230018,
  "owner_local_id": 99856
}

Information could be supplemented in future by data like this:

{
  "id": 123456789012345,
  "arrived_to": "not more than 255 characters",
  "date": 1531230018
}

Initial data and next additionals should formulate common object profile with history of all actions.

Adding new object or supplementing existed object must cost some fee.

I have private network with Clique PoA on few VPS. I write data into inputData transaction field in JSON. For searching i wrote indexer that collect data from transaction to local mysql db.

Is this normal or there are better ways storing data and manipulate it?

How i can set fee for adding new object, by smart-contract or integrate into transaction algorithm?

Estimation of quantity of objects in production is about 10-50M per year

Answer 1

I feel that using the Blockchain to store such huge amounts of data doesn't really make sense. The cost would be prohibitively expensive! Plus the blockchain isn't really meant to be used like a database.

Hence it might be better to use IPFS/Swarm to store the data, and add the IPFS hash to the smart contract as a record-keeper.

Here's a great guide to help you understand how to leverage IPFS to amplify the power of the blockchain for storage.