Batabase access | GitHub Installation | Forum

Hello,

My question is about the channels of access that external applications can have to the internal database of ThingSpeak.
If I understand well, the database is implemented using MySQL, so the main question is if it is possible to directly interact with that database from a different software, and/or what methods are available to extract data from that database to external software.

I have read in the forums that there are commands in the API to export JSON, XML, or CSV files. Those would indeed be useful, but I'm looking for something more integrated, where hopefully I could directly interrogate the mySQL database from my application. This would allow me to do real-time statistical analysis, create my own visualizations, generate separate channels to add data to the database (for instance adding data from another database, joining two sensor networks), etc. I could always make regular requests to ThingSpeak to get new data and update a separate copy of the database, but that doesn't seem very efficient and would be prone to errors.
I can imagine this is easier to do in a self-hosted system, which wouldn't be a problem for me. In that case, would I be able to directly access the database from separate programs running in the same server? or would I have to integrate my modules into the ThingSpeak code?

By the way, I'm still assessing if ThingSpeak is the right platform for my project, and therefore do not have yet experience on using your system or your API.